Minnesota families are sinking under the weight of nation-leading child care costs

Yahoo

12-05-2025

Tera Dornfeld plays with hers and Bobby SchmitzÕ son Linus Schmitz, 3, at the park after picking him up at daycare Friday, May 9, 2025.
Before Annalisa Fitzgerald gave birth to her eldest daughter in April 2020, she was thinking about pushing her baby in a stroller at the park, the tiny socks she'd one day slip over tiny feet, and how long she might breastfeed.
She wasn't thinking about years-long wait lists for a child care provider. Or how the astronomical cost would sideline her career.
But that's the reality for Minnesota parents who face the nation's third most expensive infant care, at $1,800 a month, behind Massachusetts and Washington D.C., according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. Child care for a 4-year-old is slightly cheaper, but still $1,500 a month, or $18,000 per year and unaffordable for a typical family in Minnesota, where the median household income is $87,556.
Fitzgerald, like many people when they have children, was forced to adjust her life accordingly.
Fitzgerald and her husband, who were living in St. Paul at the time, relied on his roughly $80,000 salary after she decided to leave the workforce to take care of her babies. They were born in quick succession, and both needed stays in the neonatal intensive care unit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fitzgerald sought a respite by enrolling them in child care part-time.
'We had our first two kids so close together, it kind of gave me more one-on-one time with them,' she said. 'They were both babies, and it was good for me to be at home and nursing one, and the other could go to daycare one or two days of the week.'
For her then-infant children to attend part-time at Tierra Encantada, a Spanish immersion child care, Fitzgerald said her monthly bill was $2,366, which was more expensive than her mortgage. Her parents had to chip in to cover the expense.
After a year and about $30,000 later, she and her husband moved to the outskirts of the Twin Cities metro, where they settled into a larger home and her husband secured a higher-paying job.
The high cost of Minnesota child care, Fitzgerald said, encouraged a series of life-changing decisions. She left the workforce. Her husband found a more lucrative job. They moved out of St. Paul. And, after a third child was born during this time, they undertook a medical procedure to ensure they wouldn't have more children.
Ann McCully, executive director at Child Care Aware of Minnesota, said the Fitzgeralds' experience is not unique.
McCully said Child Care Aware, which receives state and federal funding, works with some parents who will refuse raises at work so they can stay below the income ceiling on child care subsidies.
The situation is so dire, she said, that some families won't have more children even if they want them.
'What I'm hearing more than I ever have before is people saying, 'We're holding off on having a second child or having a child because we know we can't afford child care,'' McCully said.
The problem, McCully said, is that the child care market is uniquely broken — there are seemingly no winners: Parents are paying bills that often surpass their mortgages; providers are barely breaking even; and child care workers are taking home low wages despite the importance and stress of their work.
Statewide, child care workers made about $15.65 an hour in 2024, according to Minnesota Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. The earnings don't cover the calculated cost of living for a single person, and positions in food preparation, dry cleaning and animal training all reported a higher wage than those in child care. The state Department of Employment and Economic Development connects the low wages to a shortage of qualified caregivers.
Expensive infant care has plagued Minnesota parents for decades, in part because of regulations that require caregivers to oversee a fewer number of infants for safety, McCully said. In Minnesota, the ratio is 4:1 for children up to 16 months old at licensed child care centers.
McCully said it's comparable to a single parent raising quadruplets. 'Can you imagine?' she asked.
A decade ago, the Star Tribune produced Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting that detailed deaths in poorly regulated home-based child care centers.
Minnesota is now among the strictest states for child care regulations, according to a report from the Knee Regulatory Research Center at West Virginia University, but the stringent requirements have led to higher prices.
The Minnesota Child Care Association earlier this year advised against a Republican proposal that would have allowed teenage workers and unsupervised volunteers to count for the adult-to-child ratio. The organization wrote that the proposed changes were dangerous, and lawmakers should instead provide resources so care centers can hire better qualified teachers and increase accessibility for care.
According to EPI, just 5.5% of Minnesota families can afford infant care, based on a federal standard that says a family should pay no more than 7% of household income on child care.
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Think Small, a child care advocacy group, says they work with families spending as much as 40% or more of their income on child care. In one case, for instance, a south Minneapolis family spends $1,350 per month — $16,200 per year — despite an annual income of just $40,000.
If Minnesota implemented a policy to cap a family's child care expenses at 7% of income, the typical family would save $14,000 per year, and 29,000 more parents could opt for the workforce instead of staying home, according to the EPI analysis.
Former Gov. Mark Dayton in 2015 proposed universal pre-K, an estimated $348 million investment that would have granted every 4-year-old in the state access to early learning programs. At the time, parents were paying about $11,000 per year on child care — a figure that continued to grow in the years that followed. Dayton couldn't harness legislative support.
Now, Gov. Tim Walz frequently touts his mission to make Minnesota the best state in the nation to raise children. He has signed into law free school meals, a Child Tax Credit and Paid Family and Medical Leave.
But if expensive child care persists, he'll struggle to turn that mission into a legacy.
Alexandra Fitzsimmons, policy director at Children's Defense Fund of Minnesota, pointed to 'significant investments' made in 2023, when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party controlled the Legislature.
The new money in 2023 increased the number of subsidized slots for lower income children by about 19,000, according to state data, bringing the total to an estimated 55,000. Some qualifying parents, however, say the process is a bureaucratic morass of paperwork that requires constantly having to prove you don't make more than the income cap. And in any case, Minnesota is home to more than 330,000 children under age five, which means the subsidized slots aren't available for most middle class families.
For the parents of young children, help is almost certainly not on the way this year. A few Minnesota lawmakers have proposed new spending, but the state's grim budget outlook makes a significant investment in child care unlikely.
Minnesota also receives more than $200 million per year from the federal government to fund child care. President Donald Trump proposed cutting this funding in his first term, and Republicans are more focused than ever on cuts to social programs to pay for tax cuts, which means even that relatively modest federal help could be threatened.
While affording child care is one challenge, finding an available spot at a reliable center is another. McCully said parents are planning their future children around available spots at nearby care centers.
'It's certainly not the kind of family planning we wanted to be involved in,' she said.
About two years ago, Fitzgerald moved to Bayport, a small town near the Wisconsin border, where she and her husband found a better place to fit their growing family — her third child was born during the house hunt. Fitzgerald said she struggled to locate a reliable child care and faced lengthy waitlists.
'It took me a very long time to get in anywhere,' Fitzgerald said. 'I was calling people, and this was two years ago, people were saying, 'We are waitlisted until 2026, 2025.' I was like, 'Alright, so basically I had to get my baby on the list before they're even born.' It's insane the lack of options that you have.'
Fitzgerald eventually scored a spot through a lottery draw. Without it, she estimated the monthly cost of full time child care for all three of her children to range from $3,500 at a church she previously used, to about $8,000 for a private option. Her mortgage is currently about $3,400 a month, she said.
Bobby Schmitz, a parent in St. Paul, said he and his wife reserved a spot at Common Roots Montessori School when they were three months pregnant.
Schmitz' son has been going to the same care provider since he was 16 months old, which is the earliest the Montessori school allows. Schmitz said he and his wife reserved his spot while scoping out the neighborhood provider — 19 months in advance.
'We just got lucky because of our ignorance, really,' he said.
Now they're expecting a baby in July, and Schmitz said the school was among the first to know — he's already reserved a spot for his daughter in 2027.
In addition to sending his children to the Common Roots Montessori School, Schmitz joined its nine-member board last August as a way to give back. He said his responsibilities include approving the budget and ensuring the school is sustainably funded by using a mix of grants and other sources. The majority of the operational budget is covered by tuition, he said.
His involvement as a board member does not come with a discount for his 3-year-old son's care, which Schmitz said costs about $19,000 annually.
Schmitz's experience of the inner workings of the school educated him on how the child care industry is working with super low margins, and he said it's clear no one is getting rich providing care.
'Being on the board, I see the conversations on what the tradeoffs are for every dollar and how laser focused [providers] are for how to make it the best place for the kids, and the best environment for staff,' he said.
The cost is worth it, Schmitz said: 'For me it's a no-brainer to have my kids there because of the consistency, because of the thoughtfulness that I've seen. It's hard enough to have a kid away from his parents all day long.'
Schmitz said paying one child care bill isn't a 'budget buster,' but he and his wife's combined annual earnings of roughly $200,000 will be stretched when their daughter is enrolled and their annual bill increases.
Anticipating the additional cost, Schmitz said he is starting to save money now so they can pay for two kids in child care — he's preparing to pay $40,000 a year.