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Child care in Minnesota is among the most expensive in the nation, according to data released this month by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
The average annual cost of infant care in the state adds up to more than $22,000 annually, or almost $1,900 a month. Only DC and Massachusetts have higher infant care costs.
“Infant care in Minnesota costs $9,474 (72.3%) more per year than in-state tuition for four-year public college,” the report finds. It adds up to nearly 20% of the median family income. The cost is only affordable for about 5.5% of families, under a standard federal measure of child care affordability.
A Minnesota minimum wage worker would need to work full-time for 51 weeks in order to pay for child care for one infant.
The report underscores an apparent paradox behind these figures: Child care workers receive very little pay, making it difficult for them to afford the very services they provide.
“This isn’t inevitable — it is a policy choice,” said EPI research assistant Katherine deCourcy in a statement. “Federal and state policymakers can and should act to make child care more affordable, and ensure that child care workers can afford the same quality of care for their own children.”
Part of the problem is that caring for children, especially infants and toddlers, is tremendously labor-intensive. Minnesota requires facilities to have at least one staffer for every four infants, with the ratio going up to 1:7 for toddlers. Those figures are in line with national recommendations, according to ChildCare Aware of Minnesota, an advocacy group.
On top of staffing requirements, facilities also need to pay for food, rent, insurance, equipment and other normal business expenses. It’s difficult to make the numbers add up.
For those reasons, groups like EPI recommend that governments subsidize the cost of child care to alleviate financial burdens on families and help parents of young children enter the workforce.
Capping Minnesota’s child care costs at 7% of a family’s income, for instance, would save the typical family about $14,000 a year and allow nearly 30,000 parents to re-enter the labor force.
The 2023 DFL-controlled Legislature increased subsidized child care slots for lower income Minnesota children by about 19,000, bringing the total to an estimated 55,000. But that’s a drop in the bucket — Minnesota has over 330,000 children under age 5.
During the 2024 legislative election campaign, then-House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, said Democrats would consider a more comprehensive solution to Minnesota’s child care woes, but they lost control of the House. And Minnesota’s fiscal outlook has darkened considerably, making a substantial increase in child care funding unlikely.
For their part, Republican legislators have introduced a bill that would loosen some regulations on child care facilities, allowing teenage workers and unsupervised volunteers to count toward a facility’s child-to-staff ratio. But representatives of the state’s child care industry have warned that doing so could put children’s safety at risk.