One in five American families paying for child care now spends more than $30,000 a year on it, according to Care.com’s 2026 Cost of Care Report, based on a survey of 3,000 U.S. parents of children 14 and under conducted in late November 2025. That figure alone is striking, but the number that puts it in context is the federal government’s own definition of what child care should cost: the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers 7% of family income the benchmark for “affordable” care. The families in Care.com’s report are spending, on average, close to three times that.
The $30,000 Line
Twenty percent of surveyed families — one in five — reported spending more than $30,000 a year on professional child care, a threshold that in many parts of the country now rivals or exceeds a year of in-state public university tuition. The report surveyed parents actively paying for care, not a general population sample, which means this is a snapshot of families already inside the system, already writing the checks, rather than families who might be priced out of care entirely and simply not counted here at all.
What “Affordable” Actually Means, on Paper
The 7% figure isn’t Care.com’s number — it comes from HHS’s own long-standing guidance on what share of income a family should reasonably spend on child care before it’s considered a financial burden. Against that yardstick, the report found that families are spending an average of 20% of household income on child care, nearly triple the government’s own affordability line. That gap between the official definition of “affordable” and what families actually pay is the clearest evidence that the child care market and federal policy are operating on two entirely different assumptions about what a reasonable price looks like.
Nearly Four in Five Families Are Over the Line
The 20% average obscures how few families are anywhere near the 7% benchmark at all: 78% of families surveyed said they spend 10% or more of their household income on child care, meaning the typical family in this report isn’t just slightly over the affordability line — they’re well past it, and the $30,000-a-year households pulling the average up are far from an isolated outlier group.
The Savings Drain
Faced with that gap, families aren’t simply absorbing the cost through their regular budgets. Care.com’s report found that 31% of families are dipping into savings to cover child care expenses — meaning nearly a third of the families surveyed are treating a routine, recurring monthly cost the way most households treat a true financial emergency, by pulling from reserves meant for something else, whether that’s a home repair fund, retirement savings, or an emergency cushion.
A Cost That Doesn’t Stay Contained to the Child Care Line Item
None of this shows up in isolation. A family spending 20% of its income on child care and dipping into savings to make up the difference is a family making trade-offs somewhere else — delaying a home purchase, postponing retirement contributions, or in some cases deciding one parent’s income barely covers the cost of the care needed to let them keep working at all. That last scenario is the arithmetic at the center of the child care affordability debate: when care costs approach or exceed what a second income actually nets a household after taxes and the expense itself, staying in the workforce and breaking even start to look like the same decision, not two different ones.
A Gap That Isn’t Closing on Its Own
The distance between a 7% federal affordability benchmark and a 20% real-world average isn’t a rounding error or a temporary spike — it’s the shape of a market where supply, wages for care workers, and family budgets have been drifting further apart for years, not converging. Families spending more than $30,000 a year aren’t outliers gaming a bad system; they’re the visible edge of an affordability gap that the government’s own definition of “reasonable” hasn’t caught up to, and the 31% dipping into savings each month are a preview of what happens when a fixed, unavoidable expense simply outgrows what a paycheck alone can cover.
What makes the $30,000 figure especially hard to shrug off is that it’s an average pulled from families who are, by definition, still paying for care — it doesn’t include the households who priced out professional child care entirely and rearranged a career, a schedule, or a household around going without it. Read that way, Care.com’s report isn’t describing the outer edge of an affordability problem; it’s describing the baseline cost of staying inside the system at all.