Five years after the onset of the pandemic, child care employment has grown by about 47,200 (4.5%). Yet the child care sector continues to face a long-standing jobs crisis, with workforce shortages that predate 2020.
Job growth has remained sluggish at 1.4 percent since the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Child Care Stabilization funding allocations ended in October 2023. In the last six months, national employment has hovered around 1.1 million.
The numbers suggest that ARPA funding, along with continued support from states and localities after its expiration, helped to stabilize the field and sustain job creation. With the proposed federal funding freeze on safety net programs such as Medicaid and SNAP that 43 percent of child care families rely on, and uncertainty surrounding Head Start and other publicly funded child care programs, the impact on child care jobs remains uncertain. The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment will continue to track employment numbers.
Figure 1
221,000
child care jobs added since April 2021, when ARPA funding distribution began.
25.26%
Percentage child care jobs have increased since April 2021, when ARPA funding began to be distributed
In the states and metro areas we track, child care employment generally mirrors the national trend, with job numbers slightly surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
However, with federal funding under attack, it remains critical for state and local governments to invest in the workforce. Our updated early care and education (ECE) Workforce Compensation Tracker shows how states, territories, tribal governments, and local entities are supporting early educators.
Figure 2
Table 1
Starting in June, we will shift to a new approach for tracking child care job numbers, moving from monthly to quarterly data. This approach provides a more stable and comprehensive picture of the workforce, as well as state-level numbers for all states.
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.