A home daycare owner's take-home has no verified national average: BLS publishes no wage figure for home daycare owners, and the research for this page found no verified study of family child care net income.
The number is business arithmetic — what families, subsidy programs, the food program and any supplement pay in, minus what running the program costs — and it moves with your hours and the number and ages of children you serve.
Typical net income
Start with the honest answer: no verified national figure describes what a home daycare owner takes home.
The research behind this page found no verified study of family child care net income, and BLS publishes no wage figure for home daycare owners.
What the agency does say is that pay for self-employed childcare workers depends on the hours they work and the number and ages of children in their care — so an owner's number is a business result, not a figure those sources can give you.
There is a structural reason the figure is missing.
BLS's OEWS wage survey covers 518,910 childcare-worker jobs, out of about 1.0 million childcare jobs in 2025 — 24 percent self-employed and another 17 percent working in private households.
Both groups fall outside the survey, so the childcare-worker medians BLS publishes describe payroll employees, not an owner running a program out of their home.
The nearest published benchmark is an employee wage: childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) earned a median of $16.82 an hour, or $34,980 a year, in May 2025.
Read it as employment-side context for the field — not as an owner's income, and not as a stand-in for one.
The family child care provider pay data page explains what BLS does and does not publish for this role, and points to the nearest occupations it does cover.
BLS publishes no average for owner income
How the math works
An owner's income is what the program returns after everyone and everything else is paid.
The math runs in three layers: what the program collects, what the program costs, and what is left for you.
The money coming in arrives on a few main lines.
Families paying privately bring tuition, which you price against your local market and your costs.
An enrolled family may pay through state child care assistance, which pays the provider under that program's own rules.
And a home that participates in the USDA's Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) collects a reimbursement for qualifying meals and snacks it serves — the per-meal rates are covered below.
State salary supplements, covered at the end of this page, can add to these.
Two ceilings shape that first layer.
Your licensed capacity caps how many children you can care for at once — the licensing steps behind the ceiling are part of starting a home daycare.
Your calendar is the second ceiling: only the weeks your program runs can bill.
Both land on revenue before a single expense is paid, and BLS names the number and ages of children among the drivers of self-employed childcare pay.
What remains after the program's costs — and after taxes on the profit — is the owner's take-home.
That is the number the question “how much does a home daycare owner make” is really asking for, and it is why two owners with similar enrollments can still land far apart: the cost side differs home to home.
The same layers run at larger scale in a center.
The daycare owner income breakdown for center and franchise owners covers that side of the question.
Expenses and taxes
Gross collections overstate an owner's income, because the program's costs come out first.
The recurring lines for a home-based program include:
- Food and menu costs — offset in part where CACFP reimbursement applies.
- Supplies and equipment — curriculum and art materials, cots and furniture, and replacement as items wear out.
- The home's program share — the portion of utilities, internet, upkeep and repairs that the program's use of the house accounts for.
- Insurance — where you carry a family child care or business policy, the premium is a program cost.
- Training and credentials — course fees and renewals for the training you run on.
- Help you hire — an assistant's wages and payroll costs, and coverage for days you cannot work.
- Administration — bookkeeping help or software, and screening costs for anyone you bring on.
Taxes sit between the program's profit and the money that is actually yours.
How self-employment income is reported, which costs count against it, and what you owe are questions with real answers that depend on your household and your state — and they are past this page's job.
A tax professional who works with home-based providers can tell you what applies to you.
What the math itself says is simpler: an owner's take-home is computed on profit, not on collections, which is why the expense lines above deserve the same attention as the revenue ones.
Hours worked
BLS names the hours you work as one of the drivers of self-employed childcare pay, alongside the number and ages of children in care.
Both come before any rate you set: the children determine how many slots a home can sell at once, and the hours determine how much of that capacity is actually in use.
The care day is the visible half.
The business's other half happens around it — cleaning and resetting the space, planning and prepping meals, records and billing, enrollment tours and family messages, and the documentation your licensor — where your home is licensed — or any program you join asks of you.
None of those hours bill a family, but they are part of what the income costs you.
The calendar works on revenue the same way.
The weeks a program operates are the weeks it can collect, so a year-round calendar and a school-year calendar turn the same enrollment into different annual totals, and a closure day is a day the program's ongoing costs run without collections behind them.
Owners who read their income honestly count all of it: the paid hours, the unpaid ones, and the weeks actually open.
Ways providers earn more
Every lever moves a layer of the math: more enrollment, better-paid slots, offset costs, or programs that pay outside tuition.
Fill the seats your capacity allows. An open slot collects nothing while its share of the costs continues, so steady enrollment — and a plan for replacing a departing family — protects the whole revenue line.
Collect the food program's per-meal rates. USDA's Child and Adult Care Food Program publishes day care home reimbursement rates.
For July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027, in the contiguous states:
| Meal | Tier I | Tier II |
|---|---|---|
| Breakfast | $1.74 | $0.62 |
| Lunch or supper | $3.31 | $1.99 |
| Snack | $0.98 | $0.27 |
Rates run higher in Alaska, Hawaii and the U.S. territories.
The schedule above is the 2026–27 program year — confirm your tier and the current rates with the state agency that administers CACFP where you live.
The joining rules, tier criteria and claim limits are covered on our guide to how much home daycare providers make.
Stack the supplements your state funds. Two verified examples cover family child care providers.
In North Carolina, Child Care WAGE$ — run by Early Years, Inc. — pays education-based salary supplements to teachers, directors and family child care providers working with children birth to 5 in participating counties, paid after each completed six-month commitment period at the same program, and Early Years reports an average six-month supplement of $1,285.
Eligibility includes working in a participating county at least 10 hours a week, holding an education level on the WAGE$ scale, and earning at or below the local income cap — $19, $23 or $25 an hour depending on the county, fixed until June 2027.
The T.E.A.C.H.
Early Childhood National Center's Programs by State page lists WAGE$-model programs in other states, including Florida INCENTIVE$, Iowa WAGE$ and Tennessee WAGE$.
Maine funds its own supplement.
The Early Childhood Educator Workforce Salary Supplement pays monthly stipends through licensed programs by MRTQ registry level — $240 a month at Tier 1 (Levels 1–4), $360 at Tier 2 (Levels 5–6) and $540 at Tier 3 (Levels 7–8), with Level 0 staff not eligible — and its eligibility rules explicitly include family child care providers, owners and directors at a licensed facility or family child care program that holds, or has applied for, an OCFS vendor code.
Both programs pay by education or registry level, which is the pattern worth noticing in these two: the training and credentials you build in this field are what both scales climb.
To find out whether your state funds one, ask the agency that licenses your home, or search your state's name together with “early educator salary supplement.”
Career and employer information, not licensing, tax or legal advice. Confirm capacity and training questions with your state child care licensing agency, CACFP rates and tiering with USDA and the state agency that runs the program, and supplement eligibility with the programs themselves — before you act on any figure on this page.
Confirm the rates and the eligibility rules before you count on them