How much does daycare cost in Denali Borough?

FACTANKER — For full-time infant care at a licensed center in Denali Borough, Alaska, the U.S. Department of Labor puts the median price at $336.23 per week in 2018 — $17,483.96 per year at 52 weeks, which is this site's arithmetic, not the department's. The record runs 2014–2018. It is a modelled county estimate, and it is not what a parent pays today.

Among the 2,820 counties that reported a price, Denali Borough ranks in the 98th percentile — the national median is $7,777.64.

The county is not uniformly expensive. Against all reporting counties in 2018, Denali Borough sits in the 99th percentile for toddler, center but the 18th for school-age, center — a spread of 81 percentile points across the eight care types. A single headline figure hides that.

Heaviest on a median family budget: infant, center. It takes 17.06% of median family income in Denali Borough — the highest of the 4 care types on record here. The publisher computes this share for survey year 2018 only, so it does not move with the 2018 prices above.

How the series moves, and why the rate is not a growth rate. Infant centre care goes from $9,492.08 in 2014 to $17,483.96 in 2018, +84.2% over 4 years. Over the same window the median across all reporting counties moved +12.9% ($6,891.56 to $7,777.64). No inflation adjustment on our side: the source columns carry no reference-year label.

The series is shorter than it looks. Denali Borough has an infant-centre price for 3 of the 15 survey years 2008–2022; the first is 2014. The 12 missing years are shown as “no observation” in the table above and must not be filled in by interpolation — the publisher did not observe them.

Population: all counties reporting a price for the same age group, same setting, same reference year. Counties without a report are excluded and do not count as zero.

Percentile = share of counties with a lower value, rounded commercially. Ties do not count as lower. Median = 50th percentile of the same population, unweighted. Population thresholds use the column “Total population” of the same dataset.

Median yearly price, derived from the median weekly price of the state survey times 52. Full-time care. Age groups as defined by the state; where a state gives no definition, the Child Care Aware standard applies.

Not a federal survey. The basis is the Market Rate Surveys that individual states conduct to set their subsidy rates; the Department of Labor harmonized them and aggregated them to county level. “Median” means the median of the prices found in that state’s survey, not the median of a complete list of facilities surveyed federally. Survey methods are not identical between states, and any comparison across state lines carries that difference.

How the county value is produced: the publisher standardises prices reported hourly, daily, monthly or yearly into one weekly figure, then estimates county values from the state figure using a regression on census characteristics of the county, weighted by households. The publisher reports a fit of R² = 0.84 for the 50th percentile model.

Each price carries a method flag with the value 1, 2 or 3. In this dataset almost every price has one — 169 of 281,510 do not, and for school-age care the source publishes no flag column at all, which is not the same as an unflagged measurement. What the three levels mean is not stated in the September 2024 technical report, and this site does not guess: the flag is passed through unchanged, in the table above and in the API as source_quality_flag.

How much of the series is filled in: 45% of all year-over-year steps (14,471 of 32,449, measured 27 September 2026 across the infant-centre series) are exact arithmetic continuations of the previous step — the same difference repeated. That is the signature of interpolation between state survey years, not of annual measurement. Years are labelled estimated in the API for this reason.

Not a measured price and not fifteen independent observations. Not a state reimbursement rate — that is an administratively set subsidy ceiling, not a parent payment. Not a current price list; for 2026 no nationally comparable county-level dataset exists. Not adjusted for inflation by this site: the columns used here (MCInfant and siblings) carry no reference-year label, and no deflator is applied on our side — so do not read a multi-year change as a real-terms change without checking the publisher’s own definition first. Not an average across settings.

Download the full result table for all counties (CSV) ↓

U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, National Database of Childcare Prices (NDCP2022.xlsx, survey years 2014–2018), Denali Borough, FIPS 02068, median weekly price for infant center-based care, survey year 2018. Annualisation (×52), percentiles, medians and comparison groups: own calculation by FACTANKER. https://factanker.com/us/ak/denali-borough/childcare