Arlington, Alexandria daycare costs rank among nation’s highest

Childcare is inaccessible to many, but Northern Virginia takes the cake on expenses.

Republicans and Democrats can agree that childcare in the US is too expensive, but lawmakers have prioritized public investment elsewhere as parents, workers, and childcare providers struggle to make things work. 

Virginia, in particular, is highly cost-prohibitive. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Arlington County topped a list of localities where daycare is most expensive in the US. The total median cost of sending one child to day care in Arlington for five years was $146,741, according to the Journal’s tally. Not far behind, Alexandria’s total median cost for five years of daycare was also in the top 10 most expensive at $123,977. 

By comparison, the average tuition and all mandatory fees for in-state undergraduate colleges for one year came out to $14,460 for the 2024-2025 school year, according to a report from the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia. The figure multiplied by five comes out to $72,300, well below the costs of daycare calculated for Arlington or Alexandria. 

Maureen Coffey, an Arlington County Board Member, said the high costs of childcare comes up often amongst her Millennial and Gen Z peers who are also contending with the rising cost of housing as they think about their futures. 

“I think a lot of us in my peer group really just feel discouraged about the ability to have a family, to even think about whether we want to have a family, because it feels financially just so out of reach,” Coffey said. 

Allison Gilbreath, a senior director of policy and programs at Voices for Virginia’s Children, said childcare is an industry where parents can’t afford to pay more and providers can’t afford to charge less. Childcare staff, meanwhile, aren’t paid living wages, making somewhere closer to $10 or $15 an hour, she said.  

“It’s not a business model that works,” Gilbreath explained. “And we haven’t started to treat childcare like a public good in the same way that we fund K-12 education.”

Virginia does have programs like Head Start, where federal money supports programs for low-income children from birth to age five. There is also the Virginia Preschool Initiative that distributes state dollars to schools and community-based organizations for preschool programming. The Virginia Early Childhood Foundation also offers what it calls a Mixed Delivery program that also helps low-income families pay for childcare. 

While these programs are “phenomenal,” they are not enough to meet the demand, Gilbreath said, adding that, statewide, there are thousands of children on the waiting list for those programs. 

It doesn’t help that the Trump administration’s federal spending cuts have created uncertainty around how these programs will continue to be funded in Virginia.  

“Some localities are just really concerned about how they keep and sustain these programs, with a lot of uncertainty at the state level, because ultimately the locality could be caught on the back end of needing to pay the bill,” Gilbreath said. 

Supporting child care too often falls by the wayside when it comes to state funding, said Coffey. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin blocked earlier this year the creation of a $25 million pilot program aimed at helping families with the cost of child care. 

Virginia’s funding challenges are expected to become more apparent in the upcoming session, when state lawmakers are likely to consider how best to address federal layoffs and spending cuts. 

Coffey said that’s understandable given how critical it is to protect people’s access to food through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and healthcare through Medicaid. But it also means that the problems with Virginia’s child care system aren’t going away anytime soon. 

That’s despite the many benefits that come when communities make childcare more accessible. Coffey said all the money spent on childcare means there’s less spending in other parts of the economy, and quality childcare early on often means greater well-being for children as they get older. 

“There’s so many reasons to do this,” Coffey said. “I don’t know what it takes to get it to be kind of the front of the line.”