Child care sector employment sees a small uptick after adding 4,500 jobs in February (and accounting for previous January estimates being adjusted downwards). Child care employment today is 5.7% below what it was in February 2020, just before the onset of the pandemic.
Figure 1
-59,800
Child care jobs lost since Feb 2020
94.3%
Percentage of child care jobs today compared to Feb 2020
Note: Employment numbers for states and locales will be updated after they are released on March 17th.
Figure 2
Details on the data source
- Data Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2021). Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey.
- Current month’s jobs numbers are a preliminary estimate by BLS. Our figures include BLS adjustments to previous months and thus may differ from earlier Jobs Tracker Figures. These estimates include employees in the “child day care services” industry, which includes child care, Head Start, preschool and school-age care programs. The estimates include employees only and do not include self-employed workers, such as owners of home-based child care figures published by CSCCE.
- This employment data cannot be disaggregated by education, race/ethnicity, role, setting, or funding stream.
- For the “child day care services” industry, estimates for a small number of states and cities are available, a selection of which are included here. The availability of state- or city-level estimates varies by industry, and the most recent month’s jobs numbers are a preliminary estimate by BLS. These data are released by BLS later in the month than national.
