Childcare Provider Turnover: Patterns Across Geographic Locale and Programmatic Characteristics Since 2000

• In Event: Early Care and Education Access, Quality, Spending, and Worker Turnover: Implications for Child Development

Abstract

Geographic proximity to childcare providers is an important policy issue, highlighted by attention to “childcare deserts,” where access is unevenly distributed and associated with race, income, and rural status (Malik et al., 2018; Sipple et al., 2020). Yet most research treats access as a static stock of providers or slots at a point in time. We focus on the dynamics of access. Specifically, we examine childcare provider turnover, defined as annual change in the number of providers available per capita, including among places with similar levels of supply. This dynamic perspective also matters for the kinds of programs families can reach, since repeated entry and exit may reshape the programmatic mix available across locales (Paschall et al., 2020; Anderson & Mikesell, 2019). If more stable and less stable provider types are unevenly distributed, turnover may change both how much care is available and what kinds of care remain available. We therefore conceptualize unequal geographic access along two dimensions, the level of childcare supply and the stability of that supply over time.

Turnover is a substantively important dimension of access. Frequent provider openings and closures can impose repeated search costs on parents, alter travel time, and disrupt work arrangements. For children, instability may weaken continuity in caregiver relationships and daily routines, especially for low-income families whose care arrangements are already more fragile (Speirs et al., 2015). Turnover may also change the characteristics of local childcare markets by shifting families across provider sectors and settings that differ in cost, schedule, and regulatory features. Recent evidence further suggests that childcare provision is lower in higher-poverty areas and that private provision is more volatile than public provision, raising the possibility that scarcity, instability, and programmatic differences are concentrated in the same places (Pelletier et al., 2025).

Our descriptive study uses a unique dataset of 128,450 childcare centers in 16 U.S. states. Fourteen state datasets were obtained through FOIA requests and two were publicly available. The data are reported daily and span 2000 to 2024, with most states observed from 2000 to 2023. We ask three questions.

1. How is provider turnover distributed within and between regions, states, and locales?

2. What local characteristics, including poverty, race and ethnicity, locale, and program characteristics, predict turnover?

3. How are supply, turnover, and program characteristics related?

Results will provide a new typology of unequal childcare access and a sharper geographic account of where disadvantage is concentrated. Some places may exhibit persistent scarcity, with low supply and low turnover. Others may have moderate or high supply but high turnover, producing fragile access that cross-sectional measures miss. Still others may combine low supply with high turnover, creating especially severe disadvantage. By tracing turnover across multiple policy and economic shocks since 2000, this study extends a literature centered largely on the COVID-19 period (Lee & Parolin, 2021; Zhang et al., 2023). Policy implications include tracking turnover alongside slot counts and targeting stabilization supports to places where families face the greatest risk of losing access.

Author

• Rachel Zoe Fischer, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author