Childcare Safety & Supply Index

Methodology

This edition covers 233,802 licensed facilities across 52 jurisdictions, drawn from the licensing and inspection records DaycareAlert collects directly from each state agency. Facilities flagged as temporarily closed are excluded, and a jurisdiction is published only when it has at least 50 facilities on record.

Licensed slots per 100 children under five

A state's total licensed capacity divided by its population age 0–4, times 100. Licensed capacity is the maximum a facility may enroll rather than its actual enrollment, and not every child under five needs paid care — so read this as a relative supply signal, not a coverage rate. Licensed capacity also covers school-age programs in most states, so jurisdictions that license a lot of after-school care will show higher supply than their under-five picture alone would suggest. Population figures come from U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program (Vintage 2024), sc-est2024-agesex-civ. Canadian jurisdictions have no comparable figure here and are left blank.

Safety score

The mean of facility safety ratings in the state, rescaled from the published 0–5 scale to 0–100. Facility ratings are computed by a weighted-severity model applied identically everywhere; the full formula is published in how ratings work.

Clean rate

The share of a state's facilities with no high-severity findings recorded against them.

High-severity findings per 100 facilities

Total high-severity findings on record divided by the number of facilities, times 100.

Blank cells mean missing data, not zero. We collect from 52 licensing agencies and they do not all publish the same fields. A metric appears only where the underlying records exist for that jurisdiction: safety scores are published for 46 of them, inspection-finding rates for 46, and supply figures for 38. Where a jurisdiction is blank, no inference should be drawn about childcare there — it means we do not yet have that agency's data, and a state with no inspection records loaded is never counted as having a clean one.

An important caveat on cross-state comparison. States write their own licensing standards, set their own inspection frequencies, and use their own severity vocabularies. A state with more findings per facility may be enforcing more rigorously rather than housing worse childcare, and a state with few findings may simply inspect less often. These figures describe what each state's regulators recorded — they are not a controlled comparison of childcare quality between states, and we would ask anyone citing them to say so.

Why this edition does not publish prices. DaycareAlert models a monthly cost estimate for individual facilities, and those estimates are useful on a facility page. They are not yet sound for state-to-state comparison: the model's adjustments depend on facility attributes that our source records describe in far more detail for some states than others, so a state's apparent price spread partly reflects how much its licensing agency publishes rather than what care actually costs there. Rather than publish a number we would have to retract, we are holding cost out of the index until the underlying attributes are normalized across states and the output is validated against the U.S. Department of Labor's National Database of Childcare Prices. It will appear in a future edition, clearly marked, or not at all.

Index generated 2026-07-25. Editions are published quarterly and previous editions are retained unchanged. Questions or corrections: contact us.