Terms of use

ChildcareCost is published by Sharon Ben-Moshe, an individual. In these terms, “we” and “us” mean that person, and “you” means whoever is reading the site.

This is the most important section on the page. Please read it before relying on anything here.

• They are official figures, from 2022. Every price comes from the National Database of Childcare Prices (NDCP), published by the U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau. 2022is the most recent year that dataset covers. It is not this year’s market, and prices have moved since.
• They are medians, not prices. A county figure is the middle of a distribution across many providers. No specific provider charges it, and roughly half charge more.
• They are not quotes or offers. Nothing here is an offer of care at any price, and we have no arrangement with any provider. To learn what a place actually charges, you have to ask that place.
• They are not advice. The site is information — not financial, legal, tax, or childcare advice — and it does not know your circumstances. The calculator does arithmetic on numbers you type in; it is not a recommendation about what you can afford.
• Figures labeled derived or estimated mean it. Where a figure has been converted between time periods, adjusted for inflation, or flagged as imputed by DOL, the page says so next to the number. Read those labels — they are not decoration.
• Gaps are real gaps.Where the official data has no value for a county, the page says so. We never fill a hole with an average, a model, or a neighbouring county’s price.

The full detail on sources, conversions, aggregation, and known limitations is on the methodology page.

We work hard to reproduce the official data faithfully, and the site is checked against the source. Even so, it is provided as is, with no warranty of any kind — express or implied — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not promise the site will be available, uninterrupted, or error-free.

If you find something wrong, please tell us at support@childcarecosts.app. We would rather fix it than defend it.

Decisions about childcare are yours, and they should rest on more than a median from a public dataset. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss arising from your use of, or reliance on, this site.

Nothing in these terms limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

The underlying dataset is a work of the U.S. federal government and is in the public domain — it was never ours to license, and we do not claim it. Cite it as:

U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, National Database of Childcare Prices (2022).

Our own contribution — the writing, the design, the code, and the way the figures are compiled and presented — belongs to us. You are welcome to quote or screenshot pages, cite our figures in your own work, and link here freely; a credit to ChildcareCostwith a link is appreciated. Please don’t republish the site wholesale as your own, and please don’t present our figures without their vintage and source — stripped of that context, a real number becomes a misleading one.

Read it, link to it, cite it. The only things we ask you not to do are the ones that would break it for someone else: don’t hammer it with automated traffic heavy enough to degrade it, don’t try to breach or probe its security, and don’t use it to mislead people about what the data says.

If you want the data in bulk, don’t scrape us — DOL publishes the original dataset for free, and it is the better source for that.

We link out to primary sources — DOL, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Register, and others — because you should be able to check us. Those sites are not ours, and we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices.

We may update these terms. When we do, the date at the top changes and the new version applies from then on. If a change is significant, we will say so on this page rather than leave you to diff it.