Child care sector employment continued to increase, adding 3,300 jobs in August.
Nonetheless, employment in the sector today is 3.9% below pre-pandemic numbers.
Figure 1
-40,500
Child care jobs lost since Feb 2020
96.1%
Percentage of child care jobs today compared to Feb 2020
Among selected states and metro areas, child care job numbers dipped, with the exception of Texas where child care employment rose 3.7%.
Child care employment in New York state fell below 100% of pre-pandemic employment for the first time since January of this year, having fallen 3.6% from the previous month. Job rates continued to dip for both the Los Angeles metro area and California, which have continued to struggle to meet pre-pandemic levels, both are at 94% of 2020 employment.
Figure 2
Details on the data source
- Data Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023). 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.
