National child care employment increased by 3,400 jobs in December, a 1.2% rise since January 2025.
Figure 1
Among the states and metro areas CSCCE tracks, job trends varied. New York and New Jersey, for example, saw childcare employment rebound this past fall, perhaps due to seasonal patterns in public programs.
Figure 2
Table 1
Details on the data source
- Data Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). 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.
- 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.
Suggested Citation
Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. (n.d.). Child care sector jobs. University of California, Berkeley. https://cscce.berkeley.edu/publications/brief/child-care-sector-jobs/