How we verify what we publish
Methodology
Who reviews this site
Daycarecostmap content is reviewed by The Daycarecostmap Editorial Team before publication. Review means checking every fact against a primary source, not adding an unverified opinion. We do not claim The Daycarecostmap Editorial Team holds an industry license or certification unless that is separately and truthfully disclosed with evidence; the authority this page stands on is the verification process below, not a credential.
How data is sourced and maintained
Every childcare price on this site comes from Child Care Aware of America's 2024 Price of Care Affordability Analysis, a survey of state Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) networks fielded in January 2025 and published May 2025. Median household income figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey, and the in-state college tuition comparison uses the College Board's Trends in College Pricing 2024. We do not scrape or reprint a third party's compiled table; every cell is transcribed directly from the primary report, with that report's own name, URL, and the date we checked it against the PDF.
We also track the Department of Labor Women's Bureau's National Database of Childcare Prices (county-level, most recently expanded December 2025 but covering survey years 2008 to 2022) as background context on the data page. It is older than our primary CCAoA figures, so it is disclosed as a secondary cross-check, never blended into the headline numbers.
A state ships on this site only once its figure is confirmed against the primary source. New Mexico is the one state we cannot publish a figure for: Child Care Aware of America does not survey it, so we say that plainly on its page rather than estimating a number.
Every page carries an updated date, and this site's freshness policy
re-verifies published facts every 90 days. A page that
falls out of that window is queued for re-verification, not left to go stale.
The statistics page is this site's own original data study: every figure on it is computed at build time from the site's sourced cost data, never hand-typed.
Last full verification
The newest verified fact on this site is dated . This date is computed from the site's own content, not hardcoded, and moves automatically as pages get re-verified.
Corrections
Spot something wrong? Tell us what page, what fact, and what it should say instead. Reach the publisher through the Urban Algorithm contact page. Daycarecostmap is a project of Urban Algorithm LLC.