Updated August 27, 2026 at 5:00 AM EDT
Jennifer Williams always thought she would be a full-time working mom. But then her second son, Skyler, was born well before her first son, SJ, was old enough for free, public pre-K.
She and her husband couldn't afford to send two kids to daycare at once, so Williams left her school counseling job in Oklahoma City to stay home. Now, she works a couple of days a week at a childcare program and spends the rest of her weekdays playing with, reading to and taking care of Skyler, 2, and SJ, 4.
She said leaving her job was a difficult call to make, but it was the right one for her family.
"I guess now, I just, I can't imagine anything different," Williams said. "But it is hard to know that the choice is kind of made for me because of finances."
Nationwide, the cost of childcare has been skyrocketing. According to the nonprofit advocacy group Child Care Aware of America, which tracks costs across the United States, the national average price of childcare shot up more than 20% from 2022 to 2025, landing at $13,184 a year. Infant care saw similar increases.
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In Oklahoma — the fourth-most-affordable state to live in, according to U.S. News & World Report — Child Care Aware of America found that from 2022 to 2025, childcare costs for a 4-year-old went up 9% and infant care went up 20%. State data shows infant care prices went up even more: 36% since 2022.
In Louisiana, the next-most-affordable state after Oklahoma, childcare for a 4-year-old grew by 21% and infant care grew by 30%.
On the other side of the spectrum, Washington, which is one of the least affordable states to live in, saw childcare for a 4-year-old grow by 41% and infant costs also grow by 41%.
"We saw a big jump in childcare prices a couple years ago," said Anne Hedgepeth, former senior vice president of policy and research at Child Care Aware of America.
Hedgepeth said there's no single reason prices have gone up, but the way states subsidize childcare for low-income families has played a role.
She said states conduct regular market-rate surveys to help set the size of their childcare subsidies. Once those rates are set, states send payments directly to providers. But many states delayed their market-rate surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This means their subsidies didn't account for inflation driving up prices over the last few years.
"Childcare programs struggle with the same kinds of costs that families do," Hedgepeth said. "They're providing food to children in their care. They need supplies in order to make their programs function. They're grappling with rent or mortgages, depending on where they are, that could have an increase in their fixed costs."
To fill in the gaps, families have had to shell out more money, and childcare providers have had to make cuts.
How subsidy policies hit Oklahoma
Oklahoma's current subsidies date back to a market-rate survey from 2017.
Katie Quebedeaux runs a childcare center in western Oklahoma and is a board member of the Licensed Child Care Association of Oklahoma. She said the state has not kept up with rising costs.
"You can't reimburse us at what was acceptable in 2018, 2019, and expect us to pay costs of 2026," she said.
"We're in a situation where it's costing us more to operate than we're receiving reimbursement for."
That's not the only childcare cost challenge that Oklahomans are navigating.
In October, the state is changing income eligibility requirements in a way that will lead to fewer families qualifying for aid. And it has changed the rating system used to determine provider reimbursement rates — now, providers need to be nationally accredited to get the highest ratings, and the highest subsidies.
"We're talking thousands of dollars just to go through the process of becoming accredited, not to mention the additional staff, the additional equipment — all of the things that it takes to maintain a nationally accredited program," Quebedeaux said.
Oklahoma Human Services' Child Care Services office said in a statement that the decision to expand the rating system was part of a broader effort across the country "to provide families with more information about the quality of care and to create a stronger pathway for providers to demonstrate and be recognized for quality improvement."
Finally, during the height of the pandemic, Oklahoma used some of its federal COVID-19 relief money to pay for a $5-per-day, per-child add-on to providers' subsidy rates. When federal COVID-19 funds ran out, the state tapped into a different federal grant to extend the program, but that wasn't a long-term solution. Oklahoma ended the program in April.
The Child Care Services office said, "This decision was necessary to ensure the long-term fiscal sustainability of the child care subsidy program while continuing to operate within available federal and state funding."
But Quebedeaux said it was a hard hit: "[Providers] had planned to have that money, and then it was just kind of taken away."
Rachel Proper, president of Child Care Inc., a network of seven centers in Oklahoma, estimates that, so far, the end of the $5 add-on has resulted in about an 18% drop in her bottom line.
Proper said about 70% of her families are low income and eligible for state subsidies. To make the numbers work, she has had to take cost-saving measures like reducing staff benefits, shortening their hours of operation and no longer serving kids dinner.
Even basics like baby wipes have become too expensive for the center to provide.
"We had to cut quality measures and really kind of get down to doing basic childcare, as opposed to really doing those things that are exceptional and bring magic to our classrooms," Proper said.
State fixes in the works
Federal help seems unlikely. This year, the Trump administration rolled back a Biden-era policy that aimed to cap how much low-income families had to pay for daycare.
In the meantime, states are experimenting with their own fixes.
Michigan and Kentucky are among the states using a model known as "tri-share," where the state, employer and family contribute money toward covering childcare.
Hedgepeth said that while the tri-share models are a "great stopgap," there are some shortcomings.
"Tri-share models inherently are tied to someone's job," Hedgepeth said. "We certainly want our long-term approach to supporting childcare and early learning to be one where it's not contingent on your job, where families can access childcare if and when they need it."
In Iowa, the Statewide Child Care Solutions Fund matches private dollars with state funds to pay for childcare projects, such as expanding daycare centers or recruiting providers.
The program is projected to add nearly 11,000 new childcare slots across the state and enable about 5,000 more women to enter the workforce, according to a 2024 report from Common Sense Institute Iowa, an economic research organization.
In Oklahoma, a pilot program to address both a shortage of daycare workers and rising costs launched last year. The Oklahoma Teacher Recruitment and Retention Program expands access to subsidies for employees of childcare facilities.
But so far New Mexico is the only state to offer universal, no-cost childcare.
While states work on their own solutions, parents are still breaking the bank.
According to Child Care Aware of America, it takes 10% of a married couple's median income to afford the national average price of childcare. For a single parent, it takes 33%.
Hedgepeth acknowledged the moves that states are making toward affordability but said that for many parents, it isn't enough.
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