Same price as Manhattan, half the income: a Bronx daycare place costs 47% of what a family earns
The Bronx and Manhattan pay within $32 of each other for infant care. The Bronx median family earns less than half as much. FACTANKER put the two numbers side by side for all 2,818 US counties that report a price.
Cite as: FACTANKER, https://factanker.com/record/childcare-bronx-same-price-half-income
What we measured
The U.S. Department of Labor publishes county-level childcare prices, collected from the Market Rate Surveys that states run to set their subsidy rates. It also publishes, in the same file and for the same year, each county’s median family income. The two sit in adjacent columns and are almost never read together.
We loaded the complete file into the registry: 2,826 counties across 47 states, eight price combinations each (four age groups × centre-based and family home), for the 2018 survey year and the publisher’s adjustment to 2023 dollars. 2,818 counties report a price for infant care at a licensed centre — that is the metric used throughout this finding.
The result
In Bronx County, New York, a full-time infant place at a licensed centre cost $20,680.40 in the 2018 survey. The county’s median family income was $43,998. The place consumed 47.00% of it.
Two subway stops away, in New York County — Manhattan — the same care cost $20,648. Thirty-two dollars less. But the median family there earned $102,900, so the same place took 20.1% of the income.
The price is effectively identical. The burden is more than twice as heavy.
The most expensive county is not the most burdened
The highest price in the dataset is not in New York. It is Arlington County, Virginia: $24,440 for the same care. But Arlington’s median family income is $154,204, so the place takes 15.8% — below the level of Manhattan and a third of the Bronx.
The cheapest county in the file is Mercer County, Missouri, at $1,441.96. Between the two ends of the range lies a factor of 16.9 — the same factor in both the surveyed and the adjusted column. The national median is $7,800.
How unusual the Bronx is
Across all 2,818 reporting counties, the median share of family income spent on an infant centre place is 12.7%. The 90th percentile is 16.8%, the 99th is 22.1%. Bronx County, at 47.0%, is the only county in the entire file above 22.1% — it sits more than twice as far out as the next-most-burdened county.
78 of 2,818 counties exceed 20%. They are not evenly spread: California has 18, Washington 11, Ohio 7, New York 5.
Centre care costs more — but less so as children grow
A second pattern runs through the whole file. Centre-based care is more expensive than family home care almost everywhere, and the premium shrinks with the child’s age:
| Age group | Counties where centre costs more | Average premium |
|---|---|---|
| Infant | 2,751 of 2,790 — 99% | 28.0% |
| Toddler | 2,688 — 96% | 23.2% |
| Preschool | 2,618 — 94% | 18.2% |
| School-age | 2,092 — 75% | 11.5% |
For a quarter of counties, school-age care at a centre is already the cheaper option.
What the numbers do not say
Price and income correlate at 0.681 across the 2,818 counties — expensive care is largely found where families earn more. Price and female labour force participation correlate at 0.398, distinctly weaker. We report both figures and draw no causal conclusion from either: this file cannot say whether price drives participation, participation drives price, or a third factor drives both.
The prices are medians from state surveys, harmonised by the Department of Labor, not a single federal survey. Methods differ between states, so a comparison across state lines carries that difference. The Bronx–Manhattan comparison in this finding is within one state and one survey.
The data limit, stated plainly
The last surveyed prices in this file are from 2018. The 2023 column is the publisher’s own inflation adjustment, marked “estimated” in the source. Neither is what a parent pays today. The department has since released a file covering 2008 to 2022; this finding uses the 2018/2023 release, and every county page states so at the top.
All shares of income in this finding use the 2018 price against the 2018 income — same survey year, same file, same column. That is the only pairing the data supports.
Check it yourself
Every county has its own page with all eight price combinations, five comparison groups, and the source’s SHA-256 checksum. The complete result table — 78,697 rows — is downloadable as CSV. The original file is public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105 and linked from every page.