Childcare Desert Map 2025
Visit the map here
Full Methodology here
Citation: Gibbs, H., Lee, W.F., Pepin, G., Sadowski, K., and Sojourner, A. (2026). Measuring America’s Licensed Child Care Supply. Center for American Progress Report.
This map is the product of a two-year long effort to contact every state agency with childcare licensing data in the United States to collect a comprehensive list of every licensed and registered childcare provider and relevant business information including their address, sector (Head Start, Family Day Home, Childcare, Pre-K), capacity, ages of children served, and quality.
This is an active collection process. As part of this project, I am actively scraping state websites on a monthly basis. July 2026 marked 3 years of monthly data retrieval for a total of 37 states. I have converted both the historical and real-time childcare provider-level into panels with harmonized variables and geocoded locations. The product of this effort will be used to 1) check agreement with official the Census’ childcare industry establishment records, 2) provide insights into the changing dynamics of childcare firms over time, and 3) provide a real-time, publicly available resource for researchers and policymakers to examine a historically underreported on and fragmented industry. For more information, feel free to contact me!