BLS publishes no pay figure for home daycare providers: its wage survey (OEWS) covers wage-and-salary jobs and excludes the self-employed, so its childcare-worker medians don't describe providers running their own homes.
A provider's income is business arithmetic — licensed capacity × what families pay − what the program costs — plus subsidy and CACFP lines.
This page walks that math term by term.
How much do home daycare providers make a year?
Start with the honest answer: our research found no verified study of family child care net income, and BLS publishes no wage figure for home daycare owners.
What BLS 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 — which is a reason two providers in the same town can land far apart.
The reason there is no national median is structural.
The BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey covers wage-and-salary payroll jobs and excludes the self-employed.
In 2025, 24 percent of childcare workers were self-employed and 17 percent worked in private households — groups OEWS does not survey — so an OEWS childcare-worker median describes employed childcare workers, not a provider running their own program.
For the employee-side picture, the family child care provider salary page collects the nearest employed benchmarks; read those as context, not as owner income.
What a provider actually earns is a business's net income: tuition from families, plus payments for subsidized enrollments and CACFP meals, minus what the program costs to run.
Each term is yours to set, negotiate or shop for, and the rest of this page walks them one at a time.
If you are still weighing the role itself, the family child care provider overview covers the job before the money.
How to calculate your income: enrollment × tuition − expenses
The whole page comes down to one line: net income = (enrolled children × your rate × weeks open) + subsidy payments + CACFP reimbursement − annual expenses. Every income question — a new enrollment, a rate change, joining CACFP — is a change to one term of that line.
On the money-in side:
- Capacity vs. enrollment. Your license sets the ceiling; enrollment is how many of those slots are actually filled. An empty slot earns nothing while the fixed costs of the home continue.
- Your rate schedule. Full-time, part-time and before/after-school slots can each carry their own rate, and school-age care can fill the hours that preschool-age enrollment leaves open.
- Weeks open. A year-round calendar and a school-year calendar produce different totals from the same enrollment.
- Third-party lines. Subsidy payments and CACFP reimbursement — the next section — sit alongside what private-pay families bring.
The money-out side is where home programs most often undercount: food and menu costs, supplies and curriculum, insurance, licensing fees where your state charges them, training and background-check renewals, your share of utilities and repairs, replacement equipment, and wages and payroll taxes if you hire help.
Build the line as a spreadsheet with one row per term, in today's numbers, and re-run it whenever a slot turns over, a rate changes or a program joins the picture.
Keep the program's money in its own accounts so the net you compute is real.
How subsidy and CACFP affect income
Two programs can pay a home provider beyond private tuition, and both can move the math more than any single enrollment.
Child care subsidy. Families who qualify for child care assistance can enroll with participating providers, and the assistance agency pays the provider under its own rate rules.
States set those subsidy rates using a statistically valid market rate survey or an approved alternative methodology, such as a cost estimation model, conducted no earlier than two years before the CCDF Plan (45 CFR 98.45) — which means every state has a current rate study a provider can read before pricing around it.
Taking subsidized enrollments also brings requirements with it: under federal CCDF rules, health, safety and background-check requirements apply even to license-exempt providers paid with subsidy funds (45 CFR 98.41) — though relatives specified in 98.42(c) are the main exception to the health-and-safety rules.
Confirm how your state's program pays providers with the agency that administers assistance where you live.
CACFP. The Child and Adult Care Food Program reimburses the meals a home already serves.
A day care home cannot join independently: it participates under the auspices of a sponsoring organization (7 CFR 226.2, 226.18(b)).
The program caps claims at two meals and one snack, or one meal and two snacks, per child per day for day care homes (7 CFR 226.18(c)).
Which criteria your home is paid under is a tiering question: a Tier I day care home is one whose provider's household meets free/reduced-price income standards, or that is in an area where at least 50 percent of children at the local school (or in the census area) are eligible for free/reduced-price meals; any other home is Tier II (7 CFR 226.2).
How much the program pays is the part to get from your sponsor: CACFP reimbursement rates are set annually by USDA, and this page does not quote them — your sponsoring organization can give you the current rates and which tier your home qualifies under.
Both programs have rules attached — confirm before you count on them
What's the effective hourly rate?
Net income answers "what does the business clear." Divide it by the hours you actually work and you get the number that tells you whether the job pays you: effective hourly rate = annual net income ÷ total hours worked.
The hours term is where honesty matters.
The care day is the visible part; the rest is opening early, closing late, cleaning, meal planning and prep, billing and collections, enrollment tours and family communication, licensing paperwork, and your own training time.
It is easy to skip the second half when you estimate — and skipping it flatters the answer.
Two cautions on comparing the result.
Employee wage medians are a different data series — OEWS covers wage-and-salary jobs and excludes the self-employed — so they describe someone else's employment, not your per-hour math.
And BLS names the drivers of self-employed childcare pay as the hours worked and the number and ages of children in care, which is why the rate you compute from your own books is the only one that describes your home.
Small vs large and group home income
Capacity — the first term of the formula — is a licensing number, and each state draws it its own way.
Two examples show how differently the same job is capped.
California defines a family daycare home as care for 14 or fewer children in the provider's own home: a small family daycare home serves 8 or fewer and a large family daycare home serves 7 to 14, in both cases counting the provider's own children under 10 toward the cap (HSC 1596.78).
New York sets a different line: a family day care home may care for seven or eight children if no more than six are under school age and the school-agers come before or after school or in school breaks, subject to OCFS inspection (18 NYCRR 413.2).
Your number comes from your state child care licensing agency, not from a national chart.
Where a state licenses tiers, like California's small and large homes, each tier moves the math in both directions.
A larger capacity raises the ceiling on enrollment, and it adds cost lines: help you hire once the workload or your state's rules call for it, more food on the table, more of the supplies and insurance exposure that scale with heads.
And the fine print can matter as much as the tier — California's own-children rule means a provider with young children of their own sells fewer slots than the headline cap suggests.
The tiers are visible in federal supply data too.
The Office of Child Care reports licensed small family child care homes fell 48% and licensed large FCC homes 21% from 2005 to 2017, while licensed centers rose 2%; more than 97,000 licensed homes closed over that period.
Child Care Aware of America counted 107,041 licensed family child care homes in 2019 and 94,227 in 2023 across the 39 states with available data — a 12% decline — a count our research could not independently verify, and one that is not a full national total.
Read those numbers as the market each open home sits in, not as a forecast for yours.
Ways providers raise income
Every lever is a term of the formula, which is what makes the math useful — it tells you which change moves the answer most before you spend a month finding out.
- Fill to licensed capacity — an open slot earns nothing, and one more enrollment flows through the whole money-in side.
- Mix enrollment types — part-time and before/after-school slots patch the schedule where full-time weeks end.
- Price from your costs — build the rate schedule from the expense side and your local market, then revisit it when costs move.
- Add subsidized enrollments — ask the agency administering assistance in your state what participation pays and what it requires.
- Join CACFP through a sponsor — reimbursement offsets food you already buy; ask your sponsor about your tier and the current rates.
- Work the expense lines — menu planning, supplies and an annual insurance review are the costs you can actually move.
- Re-run the hourly math after each change — decide on the effective rate, not on gross revenue.
Two of those lines — subsidy and CACFP — are programs with rules rather than costs, which makes them easy to overlook when the math is built only from tuition and expenses.
The checklist's last item is the habit that holds the rest together: a provider who knows their own numbers can see which change is worth making before making it.
This page is career and business information, not licensing, legal or financial advice. Capacity, training and background-check requirements come from your state child care licensing agency; subsidy payment rules come from the agency administering child care assistance where you live; CACFP rates come from your sponsoring organization. Confirm each before you act on the math.