How much does daycare cost in Laurens County?

FACTANKER — For full-time infant care at a licensed center in Laurens County, Georgia, the U.S. Department of Labor puts the median price at $108.50 per week in 2022 — $5,642.00 per year at 52 weeks, which is this site's arithmetic, not the department's. The record runs 2015–2022. It is a modelled county estimate, and it is not what a parent pays today.

Among the 2,590 counties that reported a price, Laurens County ranks in the 4th percentile — the national median is $9,024.60.

Heaviest on a median family budget: infant, center. It takes 11.54% of median family income in Laurens County — the highest of the 8 care types on record here. The publisher computes this share for survey year 2018 only, so it does not move with the 2022 prices above.

How the series moves, and why the rate is not a growth rate. Infant centre care goes from $4,823.00 in 2015 to $5,642.00 in 2022, +17.0% over 7 years. Of this county’s 7 year-over-year steps, 6 repeat the previous step exactly — the signature of filling in between two state surveys, not of annual measurement. Over the same window the median across all reporting counties moved +28.6% ($7,020.00 to $9,024.60). No inflation adjustment on our side: the source columns carry no reference-year label.

The centre premium is unusually narrow here. Centre-based infant care costs +5.3% relative to family-home care in Laurens County. Across the 2,590 counties reporting both, the two medians differ by +21.9% ($9,024.60 against $7,400.64) — so this county is 16.6 points below that gap. Our arithmetic from the two published medians.

The series is shorter than it looks. Laurens County has an infant-centre price for 8 of the 15 survey years 2008–2022; the first is 2015. The 7 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.

Center-based care costs 5.3% more than family home care for infants, and 5.2% more for preschoolers.

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 2015–2022), Laurens County, FIPS 13175, median weekly price for infant center-based care, survey year 2022. Annualisation (×52), percentiles, medians and comparison groups: own calculation by FACTANKER. https://factanker.com/us/ga/laurens-county/childcare