Where Our Numbers Come From: The DOL Childcare Database

Every price on ChildcareCost comes from one source: the U.S. Department of Labor's National Database of Childcare Prices (NDCP), 2022 vintage — the federal government's own county-level survey of childcare prices. We never estimate, average, or fill in a gap with a guess. When a county has no data, the page says so plainly, rather than inventing a number that looks official.

Key Takeaways

• The source is the U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau's National Database of Childcare Prices (NDCP) — the 2022 release is the most recent vintage DOL has published.
• Every U.S. county appears on the site, because our county and state list is seeded from Census Bureau geography, independent of which counties NDCP happened to survey.
• A missing data point is always shown as an absent value — never a 0, a made-up average, or a neighboring county's price substituted in.
• Some individual county prices are statistically imputed by DOL itself, not by us, when a county lacks enough direct survey responses — and we flag those with a visible footnote.
• State and national medians shown here are a labeled calculation — the population-weighted median of that scope's own county medians — not a number DOL itself publishes.

What Is the National Database of Childcare Prices?

The National Database of Childcare Prices is a dataset published by the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau. Definition first: it reports full-time childcare prices for four age groups — infant, toddler, preschool, and school-age — across two care settings, center-based care and family child care, broken out by county, and reported at the 50th percentile, meaning the actual median price families were charged. DOL collected, aggregated, and published this data itself; ChildcareCost runs no survey of its own and adds no price that DOL didn't already report. DOL's Women's Bureau conducts this work to give researchers, policymakers, and families a single, comparable measure of childcare prices across the country — which is exactly the kind of primary-source data ChildcareCost is built to surface, county by county, without the guesswork a family would otherwise face calling providers one at a time. As one point of reference, the national median price for center-based infant care in the 2022 NDCP data is $243.75 per week — a single data point we break down in far more depth, by age group and by state, in our companion post on the average cost of daycare.

Not every county has enough directly surveyed responses to support a standalone price estimate on its own. Where that happens, DOL itself statistically imputes the missing value, using its own published methodology — not ours — rather than leaving the cell blank. ChildcareCost preserves that distinction instead of quietly hiding it: county pages that rely on a DOL-imputed figure carry a visible footnote, so a directly surveyed median and an imputed one are never presented to a reader as identical in confidence. The imputation happens inside the federal dataset itself, before the number ever reaches our database — we didn't invent the technique, and we don't hide that it's used.

2022 is the most recent NDCP release DOL has published as of this writing. We don't manufacture a newer year to look current: the site periodically checks whether DOL has released an updated vintage and reloads automatically once one exists. Until then, every figure on ChildcareCost is dated to 2022, and every page that shows a price says so.

Why Do Some Counties Show "No Data"?

Every U.S. county appears on ChildcareCost — not just the ones DOL happened to survey for NDCP. That's because our county and state list comes from a separate, independent source: Census Bureau county adjacency data, which is the authoritative list of every county in the country, regardless of whether NDCP ever priced childcare there. Price data from NDCP is layered on top of that geography afterward, never the other way around. The practical effect is visible on the site today: counties in states including Connecticut, New Mexico, and Indiana currently have zero NDCP price rows, and their pages say so honestly — "no official data available" — rather than estimating a number to fill the space. That's a deliberate design choice: it would be far simpler to only list counties with data and quietly drop the rest, but that would hide the fact that DOL's survey has real geographic gaps — information a family deserves to know just as much as a price.

That honesty is deliberate, and it is the same rule that governs every number on the site: a missing data point is always an absent value, never a substituted 0, a made-up average, or a neighboring county's price standing in for the real one. It would be easy to paper over a gap with a state average, or with the figure from the county next door, and most readers would probably never notice. We don't do it, because a plausible-looking number is worse than an honest gap — it looks like real data when it isn't. For a closer look at why prices vary so widely even in counties where real data exists, see our analysis of why childcare costs so much.

How Are State and National Averages Calculated?

DOL publishes its NDCP price data at the county level; it does not hand us a single ready-made state or national number. So every state and national median shown on ChildcareCost is our own calculation, computed from DOL's county-level data, and we disclose that everywhere the figure appears. Specifically, each is the population-weighted median of that scope's own county medians: every county in the state (or the country) is ranked by price, and we report the price at which cumulative population crosses the halfway mark. A simple average of county medians would let a handful of small, expensive counties skew a state figure just as much as the populous counties where most families actually live and pay for care; weighting by population avoids that distortion. That method means every state and national figure on this site is a real price some actual county charges — not a statistical abstraction no family would ever actually pay. Counties whose population is unknown are excluded from the weighting entirely, rather than assigned a guessed weight.

This is a labeled derivation, computed by ChildcareCost from official DOL data — not a statistic DOL itself publishes — and we're explicit about that difference wherever it appears. The full calculation, including exactly how counties are weighted and rounded, is documented in detail on our methodology page for anyone who wants to check our work.

Why Did We Build ChildcareCost?

Sharon Ben-Moshe, ChildcareCost's founder, is a software developer who ran into this exact problem directly. Trying to find a straightforward, trustworthy answer to a simple question — what does childcare actually cost near me — turned out to be far harder than it should have been. Prices were scattered across outdated blog posts, marketing pages built to sell a single daycare chain's own services, and forum threads, rarely tied to an official source, rarely dated, and rarely comparable from one county to the next. ChildcareCost exists to fix exactly that gap: one dataset, sourced entirely from the federal government's own official survey, presented the same consistent way for every county in the country, with every gap in the data labeled honestly instead of papered over with a guess. The goal was never to have an opinion about childcare prices — it was to make the real, official numbers easy to find and easy to trust. Read more about the founder and the site's origins on the about page.

That's the full picture: one official federal dataset, one consistent set of rules for handling every gap, and every calculation disclosed rather than hidden. For the complete technical write-up — every column mapping, every rounding rule, every edge case we handle — see the full methodology page. We built it in the open because official data deserves an open explanation.