childcare prices · Wisconsin
How much does daycare cost in Polk County?
Full-time infant care at a licensed center in Polk County, Wisconsin has a median price of $9,464 a year (2022) — 12.3% of the county's median household income (Census ACS 2020–2024). U.S. Department of Labor data, 15 survey years.
FACTANKER — For full-time infant care at a licensed center in Polk County, Wisconsin, the U.S. Department of Labor puts the median price at $182.00 per week in 2022 — $9,464.00 per year at 52 weeks, which is this site's arithmetic, not the department's. The record runs 2008–2022. It is a modelled county estimate, and it is not what a parent pays today.
Among the 2,590 counties that reported a price, Polk County ranks in the 54th percentile — the national median is $9,024.60.
What stands out in Polk County
Selected from this county’s own record, not from a template: which of these observations appear depends on what the data for this county actually shows.
Heaviest on a median family budget: infant, center. It takes 12.96% of median family income in Polk 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 $7,800.00 in 2008 to $9,464.00 in 2022, +21.3% over 14 years. Of this county’s 14 year-over-year steps, 7 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 +43.9% ($6,273.28 to $9,024.60). No inflation adjustment on our side: the source columns carry no reference-year label.
The county is not uniformly expensive. Against all reporting counties in 2022, Polk County sits in the 73th percentile for school-age, center but the 54th for infant, center — a spread of 19 percentile points across the eight care types. A single headline figure hides that.
Method flags on record here: 1. One level across the whole series. What the levels mean is not stated in the publisher’s September 2024 technical report, so this page reports them and does not translate them.
All prices on record
First and latest survey year on record, with the change between them. All eight care types.
| Care type | 2008 | 2022 | Change | Percentile all counties |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Infant, center | $7,800.00 | $9,464.00 | +21% | 54th |
| Infant, family home | $6,240.00 | $7,800.00 | +25% | 57th |
| Toddler, center | $7,280.00 | $8,840.00 | +21% | 60th |
| Toddler, family home | $5,720.00 | $7,410.00 | +30% | 63th |
| Preschool, center | $7,280.00 | $8,840.00 | +21% | 69th |
| Preschool, family home | $5,720.00 | $7,410.00 | +30% | 65th |
| School-age, center | $6,760.00 | $7,956.00 | +18% | 73th |
| School-age, family home | $5,460.00 | $7,020.00 | +29% | 67th |
Infant care over time
Median weekly price at a licensed center, annualised. Years without a survey observation are listed as such — they are not estimates and must not be interpolated.
| Year | Weekly as published | Annual ×52, ours | Method flag source, undefined | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | $150.00 | $7,800.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2009 | $150.00 | $7,800.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2010 | $150.00 | $7,800.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2011 | $150.00 | $7,800.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2012 | $153.00 | $7,956.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2013 | $161.50 | $8,398.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2014 | $170.00 | $8,840.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2015 | $163.00 | $8,476.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2016 | $171.50 | $8,918.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2017 | $180.00 | $9,360.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2018 | $170.00 | $8,840.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2019 | $173.00 | $8,996.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2020 | $176.00 | $9,152.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2021 | $179.00 | $9,308.00 | 1 | evidence → |
| 2022 | $182.00 | $9,464.00 | 1 | evidence → |
Center-based care costs 21.3% more than family home care for infants, and 19.3% more for preschoolers.
Where this county stands
Infant care at a licensed center, 2022. A percentile without its comparison group cannot be verified.
| Comparison group | Counties | Median | This county |
|---|---|---|---|
| all counties reporting | 2,590 | $9,024.60 | 54th percentile |
| within Wisconsin | 71 | $10,920.00 | 0th percentile (rank 46) |
As a share of income
Median family income $68,234.00, survey year 2018.
| Care type | Share of median family income |
|---|---|
| Infant, center | 12.96% |
| Infant, family home | 9.75% |
| Toddler, center | 12.19% |
| Toddler, family home | 9.75% |
| Preschool, center | 12.19% |
| Preschool, family home | 9.75% |
| School-age, center | 5.72% |
| School-age, family home | 9.53% |
County context
The Department of Labor publishes these alongside the prices because childcare cost and female labor force participation are linked. This page reproduces them without asserting a causal relationship.
| Families below the poverty line | 6.9% |
| Women in the labor force | 76.8% |
How this was calculated
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.
What was measured
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.
What this number is not
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.
Source and verifiability
| Source | National Database of Childcare Prices |
| Publisher | U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau |
| Prepared by | ICF, contract GS00F010CA |
| Methodology | Technical Report, September 2024 |
| File | NDCP2022.xlsx |
| Sheet | County_LevelNDCP_v8_update2008_ |
| SHA-256 | 6722a36474118c1ef3ec0313e610a476c57a880a35f380cb8599841a8d4cce62 |
| Retrieved | 2026-09-27 |
| Original | dol.gov ↗ |
| Licence | public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105 |
| Coverage | 2,995 of 3,142 counties, survey years 2008–2022 1,424 counties in 2008 rising to 2,661 in 2022 for infant center care — coverage is not constant across the series. The percentile groups below count slightly fewer (1,419 and 2,590): they also require a population figure, which a handful of counties lack. |
| Identifier | FIPS 55095 |
Download the full result table for all counties (CSV) ↓
Cite as
U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, National Database of Childcare Prices (NDCP2022.xlsx, survey years 2008–2022), Polk County, FIPS 55095, 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/wi/polk-county/childcare
Where to go from here
- All data on record for Polk County
- All counties in Wisconsin
- All US counties
- The full result table (CSV)
Counties with a similar position in Wisconsin
- Burnett County 54th percentile
- Clark County 54th percentile
- Bayfield County 54th percentile
- Adams County 54th percentile
- Buffalo County 54th percentile
- Florence County 54th percentile
Machine access: how can AI agents and developers use this data, free and without an API key?
Every figure shown here about Daycare cost in Polk County, WI: $9,464 a year (2022), 12% of median household income can also be queried live: FACTANKER runs an MCP server at https://factanker.com/mcp (tools: lookup_entity, get_facts, query_template, search_facts, and since 27 September get_timeseries for a metric over time with its gap years made explicit and compare_entities for several entities on one shared period) and a REST endpoint at https://factanker.com/api/get_facts. Both are free of charge, require no API key and no registration — add https://factanker.com/mcp as a connector in Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot. Every answer carries its source document and a citation reference. Setup: /quickstart.
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