Access to affordable child care remains a significant challenge for many families, including those who receive housing assistance, with more than 130,000 households receiving a housing voucher also experiencing child care cost burden. While many factors drive out-of-pocket child care costs, families with infants and toddlers pay more out-of-pocket for child care than families with preschool-aged children. And while state and federally funded programs exist to offset the cost of child care, the public funding for these programs is not sufficient to meet demand. Additionally, many of these programs (like public pre-K programs) focus on preschool-aged children, not infants and toddlers.
To inform local policy making, this resource—which builds on our previous work exploring child care cost burdens for households receiving federal housing vouchers—extends our findings to explore differences in out-of-pocket child care costs for households receiving housing vouchers based on the age of children in the household.
There is a documented relationship between household income and families’ out-of-pocket child care costs.
Analysis of data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) indicates that 73 percent of households with incomes below 100 percent of the Federal Poverty Level that also use regular child care for at least one child under age 5 had no out-of-pocket child care costs in 2019. Our analysis mirrors this finding, with 89.7 percent of families reporting no out-of-pocket costs. Unfortunately, our data set is limited in that we are unable to determine how many households in our sample used regular child care or solely relied on parental or informal child care. However, we anticipate that some portion of the households in our sample that reported no out-of-pocket costs were not using regular child care.
For more information on our data source, overall sample, and data limitations, please see “Data Source and Sample” at the bottom of this page.
In the two slide-to-compare maps below, we compare out-of-pocket child care costs for households with one child under age 4 (on the left side of the slider) to households with one child ages 4–6 (on the right side). Note that the maps include only households that reported any out-of-pocket child care costs.
The first map shows the median annual child care payment among households using housing vouchers that reported any out-of-pocket child care costs. The second displays the median percentage of family income spent on child care among those same households.
Key Findings and Considerations
Households that receive a housing voucher and have a child under age 4 pay higher out-of-pocket child care costs than households with children ages 4–6. On average, households with one child under age 4 paid $522.31 more per year in out-of-pocket child care costs than those with one child ages 4–6. Access to infant and toddler care can be challenging, especially given that the supply of infant and toddler care is more limited and expensive than care for older children.
Understanding out-of-pocket child care costs for families using housing vouchers is an important step in identifying opportunities to increase access to more affordable care. While most families who receive a housing voucher did not report out-of-pocket child care costs, our previous analysis highlights that, among households that do pay out of pocket, the majority (79%) experienced child care cost burdens. For families with young children who receive housing assistance, new strategies to decrease child care cost burden and address gaps in care for infants and toddlers would support families’ economic stability by supporting children’s healthy development and allowing parents to maintain work and participate in education programs.[1]
We obtained household-level data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for years 2017 to 2024 for households that received a housing voucher. For these households, HUD asks a series of questions to determine household income. Households are allowed several income deductions through this determination process, including applicable child care costs reported on the Family Report form (the 50058 form) as the total yearly unreimbursed child care expense. Directions for the form also indicate that child care expenses are only deductible if they are necessary for a family member to maintain employment or further their education. Additionally, this dataset includes family demographic, income, and program participation information.[2]
HUD requires households to report their annual child care costs as a deductible item from their household income. For this analysis, we restricted the raw files to HUD 50058 records and to households with children under age 6. We then excluded about 0.16 percent of records missing geographic identifiers, resulting in 2,652,062 households with usable geographic information across the 2017–2024 period. All dollar amounts were adjusted to 2024 dollars using the Consumer Price Index.
We constructed two mutually exclusive age-group samples. The first sample includes households with children under age 4 (up to 3 years, 11 months) and no children ages 4–6 (up to 5 years, 11 months); this sample contains 1,273,950 households. The second sample includes households with children ages 4–6 and no children under age 4; this sample contains 865,708 households. Among households with children under age 4, 89.8 percent reported no out-of-pocket child care expenses and 10.2 percent reported some out-of-pocket costs. Our data follow a similar trend seen in other research on out-of-pocket child care costs for families with low incomes. Analysis of data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) indicated that 73 percent of households with incomes below 100 percent of the Federal Poverty Level who also use regular child care for at least one child under age 5 had no out-of-pocket child care costs in 2019. This may be because some households are not using any nonparental care, because they are using unpaid informal care, because they are using fully subsidized care, or because their out-of-pocket costs may not be eligible for the child care deduction from HUD. Unfortunately, the data do not allow us to explore why households do not have any out-of-pocket costs.
Among households with out-of-pocket child care costs, the average annual child care payment was $5,336.76 for families with one child under age 4 and $5,726.83 for families with two children under age 4. In the sample of children ages 4–6, 89.5 percent reported zero child care expense and 10.5 percent reported a positive amount. Among households with a positive child care expense in the same sample, the average annual child care payment was $4,814.45 for families with one child ages 4–6 and $5,090.79 for families with two children ages 4–6.
The interactive maps include only households that reported any out-of-pocket child care costs. For each county, we calculated (1) the median annual child care payment and (2) the median percentage of family income spent on child care among households reporting positive unreimbursed child care costs.
Footnotes
[1] For additional suggestions on ways to improve child care costs for households receiving housing assistance, please see our first brief.
[2] For detail on dataset limitations, please see our first brief.
Suggested citation
Li, W., Shaw, S., & Sun, S. (2026). Households receiving housing vouchers and paying out-of-pocket for child care pay the most when their children are young. Child Trends. DOI: 10.56417/1102q3298b