It is well-known that high quality child care is out of reach for working families in the United States. If we capped child care costs for families at 10 percent of their income, families across the nation would see significant and much-needed savings. For families with one infant, the savings could range from $350 a year in Mississippi to over $8,304 a year in Massachusetts. Capping child-care expenditures at 10 percent for families with an infant and a 4-year-old would yield even greater savings—from $4,289 a year in South Dakota to $21,085 in Massachusetts. (Savings in Washington, D.C., are substantially higher; however, it is not included in these rankings because it is an urban area, versus a typical state, and because it has outlier levels of child care costs.)

We can improve families’ living standards—particularly for those families that need the most help—by capping child care at a certain percentage of family income, and we can further increase these savings by pursuing ambitious, quality-oriented child care reform. Investing in child care also has the potential to help not only families, but also the economy: capping child care at 10 percent of family income could boost GDP by as much as $210 billion thanks to an increase in parents’ labor force participation.