Rising Child Care Costs Force Families To Rethink Parenthood

For many American families, the dream of raising children is running headlong into a harsh economic reality: child care costs are climbing at a pace that outstrips inflation, wages, and even the cost of housing in many cities. Recent research and surveys paint a stark picture, revealing that the price of care is not just a financial burden—it’s actively shaping family decisions about when, or even whether, to have more children.

According to LendingTree, an online loan marketplace cited by CBS News, families with two children now spend an average of $2,252 per month on full-time child care. That’s more than the cost of rent in dozens of the country’s largest cities. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) considers child care affordable when it accounts for no more than 7% of a household’s annual income. Yet, by that standard, a family would need to earn nearly $403,000 a year to comfortably cover care for two children—a figure far beyond the reach of most Americans. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reports that the median annual family income in the U.S. as of 2024 was $105,800, making the reality of affordable child care a distant dream for the majority.

“Child care costs are just incredibly daunting for all but the wealthiest Americans,” Matt Schulz, chief consumer finance analyst at LendingTree, told CBS News. “It forces parents into some really tough choices, including whether to have kids or not.” Schulz added that the notion of limiting child care spending to 7% of income “just isn’t realistic anymore.” Federal labor data backs this up, showing that families spent between 8.9% and 16% of their median income on full-time care for one child in 2022—the latest year for which data is available.

These mounting costs are not just a matter of household budgeting; they’re having profound demographic effects. The U.S. fertility rate has been on a downward trend for years and is now at a historic low. New research by Abigail Dow, an economics Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, connects the dots between rising child care prices and declining birth rates. Dow’s study, published by The 74, analyzed a decade’s worth of data and found that a 10% increase in the price of child care for children from birth to two years old led to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate among women aged 20 to 44. The impact doesn’t stop there: the same price hike caused women to delay their first birth by four months and to extend the time between their first and second child by half a month.

“My key takeaway is that child care costs are high in the U.S., and I do find they’re a barrier to having children,” Dow told The 74. Her research found the effect was strongest for women aged 30 or older—likely because they have invested more in their careers and thus have more to lose if forced to step back from work due to unaffordable care. Younger women, on the other hand, may have less to lose by leaving the workforce if child care is out of reach.

Dow’s findings are particularly significant because, as she points out, the U.S. system is notably different from those in Europe, where governments spend more on child care and paid family leave is more common. In the U.S., care is largely a private responsibility, and public support is limited. “There wasn’t a robust empirical analysis of: How do child care prices affect fertility rates?” Dow remarked, noting the novelty of her work in the American context.

It’s not just academic research that’s sounding the alarm. In a nationally representative survey of 3,000 respondents conducted by YouGov, the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, and Deseret News in November 2025, a record 71% said that raising children is unaffordable—a 13 percentage point jump over the previous year. The high cost of raising children was cited as the single most important reason respondents had limited the number of children they had or planned to have, outpacing a lack of personal desire and the absence of a supportive partner. For the first time in the survey’s 10-year history, cost topped the list of reasons for limiting family size.

Support for government intervention is growing in tandem with these concerns. The same survey found that support for universal day care and increased tax credits for parents has risen since 2021, while opposition to such measures has dropped by 10 percentage points. A majority now favors universal day care, and only 18% oppose it. “If you think about, ‘What do I have to think about when I’m raising a family for those early years,’ child care is going to be front of mind,” Dow said.

The situation is poised to get even tougher. Dow’s data covers up to 2022, but since then, billions of dollars in pandemic-era federal relief for the child care sector have disappeared. In the absence of that support, states like Arkansas and Indiana have scaled back their assistance. Indiana, for example, halted enrollment for new children in its child care subsidy program and reduced reimbursement rates for providers, leading to more than 100 provider closures. Arkansas has instituted new copays for parents and put subsidy applicants on a waitlist, further shifting the cost burden onto families.

Despite these challenges, policymakers in some places are taking action. In January 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul announced a plan for free child care for 2-year-olds in New York City, part of a broader push toward universal child care. Other states, such as Kentucky, are also pursuing universal pre-K, framing these initiatives as boosts for both education and working families. Yet, as CBS News notes, the rising cost of child care remains a focal point for lawmakers and policymakers nationwide.

Dow cautioned against interpreting her research as a call to relax child care regulations in order to lower costs and boost birth rates. “These regulations are really important for child health and safety,” she emphasized. “I’m absolutely not in the business of saying we should be making these regulations more lax purely to make child care more affordable for parents.” Instead, she suggests that making care more affordable through other policy means is crucial. “Anything we can do to make child care more affordable seems important from a policy perspective,” Dow said.

Between 2020 and 2024, the price of child care rose by 29%, according to Child Care Aware of America, easily outpacing inflation. As the cost of care continues to climb, and as public support for government action grows, the choices facing American families—and the policymakers who represent them—are only becoming more urgent and complex.

For now, the numbers tell a clear story: the price of child care is not just a line item on a budget; it’s a force powerful enough to reshape the American family itself.