Investments in Massachusetts’s child care sector appear to be paying off.

Thanks to programs like the Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) grant, a federal program launched to keep child care centers open during the pandemic, and the Commonwealth Preschool Partnership Initiative, a state-funded program that expands preschool access in high-need communities, the state has added more than 45,000 child care seats since its pandemic low in 2021.

An analysis by the Center for American Progress, released earlier this month, found that Massachusetts has the fewest child care deserts of any state in the nation. Over the last decade, the number of children living in child care deserts — an area where there are more than three young children per every licensed child care slot — decreased from more than half to roughly one-fifth of Massachusetts children.

These findings represent a remarkable turnaround. When CAP first measured child care deserts nationwide in 2018, Massachusetts was much closer to the middle of the pack, sitting behind 33 states including Maine, Connecticut, and Vermont. Today, only Washington, D.C. has fewer child care deserts. But Massachusetts also has some of the highest child care costs in the nation — making it difficult for many families to access the slots the state has put millions of dollars into adding. That tension is especially acute for families with infants — where a gap in supply and demand is more pronounced in the Bay State — because child care regulations require lower teacher-to-child ratios and thus higher staffing levels.

According to state data released in 2025, just 5 percent of preschoolers live in a child care desert. And, despite Massachusetts’s high marks relative to other states, approximately 70 percent of infants and 43 percent of toddlers live in child care deserts.

“Infant care is typically the most expensive form of child care, yet families often need it at a time when parents are earning the lowest salaries,” said Amy O’Leary, the director of Early Education for All, a program which advocates for Massachusetts investments in child care. “At the same time, providers face a difficult reality: Infant care is one of the most costly programs to deliver. The result is a system where infant care is expensive for families to afford and challenging for programs to sustain.”

The progress that has been made can be largely attributed to Massachusetts’ large investments in early education and care, according to Marybeth Brown, the assistant program director at Seven Hills Child Care Resources, a program that helps connect families with child care services. Funding for the Department of Early Education and Care increased by 125 percent between 2020 and 2025, helping support providers and expand capacity.

Those investments helped rebuild a system that was weakened by the pandemic, during which the number of child care seats dropped to a low of roughly 200,000 seats. By early 2025, Massachusetts had added enough seats to exceed its pre-pandemic capacity by more than 22,000 slots.

Amy Kershaw, commissioner of the Department of Early Education and Care, attributed the state’s progress to both increased funding and a coordinated strategy focused on affordability, provider stability, and workforce development.

“The Commonwealth has made real commitments with new large-scale investments in early education and care, and we’ve taken a very deliberate strategy which includes greater affordability for families, financial stability for programs, and real investment in the workforce, and the combination of those things is what I believe is contributing to a greater stability in supply and greater access for families,” Kershaw said in an interview.

A major part of that strategy has been the Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) grant program. Originally funded with federal pandemic relief funding, the grants became fully state funded in 2024 and are provided to licensed child care providers to invest in their workforce and limit tuition increases.

A survey conducted in fall 2024 by the Department of Early Education and Care found that programs used nearly 70 percent of C3 funding to increase employee compensation and on other workforce related expenses, which has helped reduce turnover in a field that has traditionally seen high levels of it.

Brown credits these grants with making child care a more attractive profession.

“The state has worked hard to increase the reimbursement rates for child care providers which has really provided them with stable income and they continue to progress with the increase in the rates. They’re also basing the rates now on a true cost of care and not a market survey rate, which impacts that greatly,” she said.

Workplace turnover among child care providers decreased from 32 to 26 percent between 2022 and 2024. That number still remains high but the offer of priority status for subsidized child care vouchers for early educators and the Early Childhood Educator Loan Repayment Program, launched in March 2026, are tools that the administration is using to improve things further.

Yet, the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (MTA) reports that early education teachers continue to earn substantially less than their counterparts in K–12 education. Center-based early education teachers make about $5,000 less annually than early-career K-12 public school teachers.

And affordability continues to be a challenge for Massachusetts families.

Massachusetts ranks among the most expensive states in the country for child care. Research from Boston University’s Institute for Equity in Child Opportunity & Healthy Development found that center-based care consumes about 12 percent of a full-time working parent’s income on average, nearly double the federal affordability benchmark of seven percent.

The burden is even heavier for low-income families. Researchers found that center-based care can consume as much as 35 percent of a low-income worker’s annual income. Black and Hispanic families face particularly steep barriers, with 85 percent and 92 percent respectively exceeding the affordability threshold.

Providers say the state’s challenge has shifted from creating capacity to funding access. Roughly 66,000 children receive subsidies through Massachusetts’s Child Care Financial Assistance program, but more than 30,000 children remained on subsidy waitlists at the end of 2025.

Kim Dion, assistant vice president at Seven Hills Foundation, said that even with additional subsidy funding, gaps would remain. “We may have the least number of child care deserts, but we certainly don’t have room for every child.”

The consequences extend far beyond individual families.

A 2022 analysis by the MTA estimated that inadequate child care costs the state’s economy nearly $3 billion annually through lost earnings, lower productivity, higher employee turnover, and reduced tax revenues. When parents cannot find or afford reliable care, workforce participation suffers.

“Massachusetts has increased child care investments markedly, and you see the impacts of that in both child care quantity and quality. We also don’t have the same level of post-pandemic challenges as other states,” said Doug Howgate, president of the MTA. “However, there remains more to be done in terms of increasing access and maximizing child care in order to enable the workforce to succeed in the Commonwealth’s economy.”

Saaya Daga is a summer intern at CommonWealth Beacon. She is a rising senior at Brandeis University studying neuroscience and journalism. In the past, she has written for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, The Enterprise, and Brookline.news.