The $13,184 Average Is Not the Infant Bill
Child Care Aware's national average is $13,184, a blend of infants and 4-year-olds across 47 states. A California center for an infant averages $23,071. After a six-month grandparent visit, one Los Angeles County family paid $1,300 a month for a toddler.
When Alice Lin's son was born in 2022, her parents flew in from China. She and her husband both work full time in Los Angeles County. Together they make about $6,800 a month.
The visit could last six months. "Every time they left, we started over," Lin told Ziwei Liu, for a World Journal story.
After the toddler started daycare, tuition was $1,300 a month. Lin had thought about taking extra work. "Between work and childcare, there's just no space left for anything else," she said.
Bills like hers are on the table before Tuesday's vote. In July, a survey of 1,000 likely voters for the First Five Years Fund, an early-learning advocacy group, found that 76 percent said the cost of care for young children is a crisis or a major problem.
Child Care Aware of America puts the national average at $13,184 a year. Sandra Bishop, who directs the group's research, published that figure in May. It mixes infants and 4-year-olds, centers and home daycares, across 47 states.
Spread over a year, $13,184 is about $1,100 a month. A baby in a center costs more than that.
The public page calls $13,184 the 2025 average. States were asked what care cost in 2024.
Match $13,184 to a baby in your state before you decide you are over or under the average. Then count the hours a grandparent is covering for free.
A baby sits at the high end
Averaging the states one by one, an infant in a center comes to $15,636 a year. A 4-year-old in a center comes to $12,555.
A home daycare, on that same average, is $11,673 for an infant and $10,572 for a 4-year-old. School-age care is not in the national figure. Child Care Aware says not to treat that national average as the price in your state.
Bishop puts $13,184 at 10 percent of median income for a married couple with children, and 33 percent for a single parent with children.
From 2021 to 2025, the national price rose 23 percent, and overall prices rose 24 percent. The average moved with other prices.
It was already a large bill. The last step was small, from $13,128 to $13,184.
What California and New York list
Child Care Aware's California sheet puts center care for an infant at $23,071 a year, about $1,920 a month. For a married couple, that is 16 percent of the state's median income. For a single parent, it is 49 percent.
New York lists $20,978 for an infant in a center. An infant and a 4-year-old in a center together come to $36,705 in California and $38,778 in New York. In all 47 states with price data, that two-child center bill is higher than rent.
Lin's $1,300 is a toddler spot in Los Angeles County, well under the state's infant-center figure. It still wiped out what little was left after the mortgage, the car, and insurance.
Lily Wang, also in the county, tried daycare for her older daughter at more than $1,000 a month. Colds ran through the house. Her husband, who drives a truck at night, missed work.
They took their daughter out. "It just wasn't worth it," Wang said.
Jane Zhang has run a Chinese nanny agency in Monterey Park for more than a decade. She told Liu that most of the families she works with pay more than $5,000 a month. That is a nanny in the house, which the national average does not include.
After the center closes
Wang is home with two children, and her parents are not here. Lin's were, until the visa ended.
Fen Chen, in West Covina, tried her in-laws after the first baby. Arguments over feeding and sleep ended it. "It's the only option left when you can't afford private help," she told Liu.
She got a subsidized seat later, because another mother told her the program existed. Her husband, a long-haul truck driver, is home only a few days a month.
Yooumi Lee, a researcher at Syracuse, and Adrienne Lee Atterberry, a sociologist at UMass Lowell, talked with eight Korean grandparents in New York's Finger Lakes. In those five families, the grandparents' care helped keep a middle-class life going. The grandparents also talked about limited English, and about being far from their own friends.
Lin's parents had a date on the calendar. Six months, and then the flight home.
Cynthia Bansak, an economist, looked at Census and American Community Survey records through 2019 with Eva Dziadula and Madeline Zavodny. Among married mothers of a child under 5, 15.5 percent of Asian mothers lived with a parent or an in-law. Among white mothers, it was 4.2 percent.
Asian women in that shared house were more often employed than Asian women living without a parent. White women in a shared house were employed less often than white women who were not.
Among Asian mothers in the study, those who were not citizens had the lowest share, 11.8 percent. Bansak and her colleagues note that a citizen can sponsor a parent to stay, and someone who is not a citizen cannot. The records stop in 2019.
Say the age out loud
If someone quotes $13,184 at you, answer with your child's age, and with whether the care is a center or a home. Then say the monthly number on your invoice.
None of those prices include a grandparent's afternoon. Who has the child after pickup? If that person is a grandparent on a visa, put the departure date next to the tuition.
If Tuesdays are grandma and the other days are a center, say that before the visa month arrives.