For many California parents, paying for childcare means racking up credit card debt

Amid rising costs in childcare, families are racking on credit card debt to pay. (Illustration composite by Sabrina Sanchez/LAist / Images via Canva)Genny Richard constantly thinks about her family’s finances.“The stress level has been immense,” she said. “Because childcare is our largest expense, that's been a big part of the reason.”Her 5-year-old son is in his third year at a full-time Montessori school in Irvine. It costs her family $2,020 a month — more than their rent. They don’t have family nearby to help with childcare.“We definitely had to start severely restricting our budget because of that cost,” Richard said. “We hardly eat out … we are part of a community garden, so we grow whatever vegetables we can on our own. … We only have one car.”They’re also staying put in their two-bedroom apartment, which is offered through UC Irvine, as they expand their family; Richard is due next month. “We’re probably in a smaller apartment than we actually need, especially with a baby on the way,” Richard said.Still, the bills began to pile up. Expenses like an unexpected trip to urgent care for an ear infection and Richard’s bout of pneumonia forced them to start putting costs onto their credit cards.“It'd be like, ‘Oh, this thing came up. This medical bill came up. We can't pay that because we have to pay childcare,'” Richard said. “The credit card debt just sort of happened over time.” And they had to deal with high interest rates. Genny Richard and her husband Fabricio have used credit cards to help pay for expenses because of the cost of their childcare. (Courtesy Genny Richard)Richard, who works at a nonprofit, and her husband, a postdoctoral fellow, have accrued tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt over the last several years. They had to pay for their son’s childcare directly from their bank accounts — so they shifted other costs to cards when they could.Their family is not alone — LAist heard from dozens of Southern California families who have had to go into debt to finance their childcare, or spend down their savings. Childcare can often be one of the largest costs in their monthly budgets, a problem reflected in state and national data:In L.A. County, childcare eats up nearly 20% of a median household income, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.In a 2026 survey by Rocket Mortgage, nearly 60% of respondents said they’ve gone into credit card debt or taken on loans due to child-related expenses. A voter poll conducted this past summer found that 3 in 4 respondents saw the cost of childcare for families with young children as a “crisis” or “major problem.” And according to an LAist review of data from the Federal Reserve, the median cost for parents who paid for 20 or more hours of childcare a week went up from $1,100 in 2023 to $1,517 in 2025 — a 38% increase.How big a problem is childcare debt?But unlike student loans and other forms of debt, good data on how much consumer debt families have because of childcare isn't available, said Chloe Gibbs, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research who studies the childcare market.She explained that while student loans are specifically financed, families are “shifting” spending and financing other household costs to pay for childcare and housing.“We can't really observe that in data because we just see the consumer debt, and we don't know the reason, the impetus behind families perhaps shifting to using credit cards to pay for expenses, so it's an area where we don’t know much,” she said. That affects the ability of researchers and policymakers to know how childcare challenges affect a family’s financial circumstances in both the short and long term, she said, and how they contribute to broader concerns about affordability.“I think it really is just reflective of the very fragmented landscape around early childhood care and that we just haven't made a concerted public effort in this space at all. So we've kind of left families to navigate and figure out these challenges on their own,” she said. “In the same way, we have just kind of let the data float around in no way that we actually sort of systemically measure and collect.”What is clear, Gibbs said, is that childcare costs have been rising higher than the rate of inflation, and it’s not surprising families are using credit cards to help with other living expenses. Childcare costs are up 6.6% since January 2025 — and up 31.3% since December 2019, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by the Economic Security Project.Why are costs rising?At the same time, childcare providers have been struggling. Childcare providers are among the lowest-paid professionals nationwide. The workforce has also been shrinking, limiting the availability of care, which economists say drives up prices.A national survey found that early educators are also grappling with the increasing cost of food, insurance and facilities costs in an industry that has already operated on thin margins. As a result, the majority of providers have had to pass along some costs to families by raising tuition, the survey found.“There's just a fundamental mismatch in this market,” Gibbs said. State and federal childcare subsidies are usually tied to income, Gibbs noted, so families who earn too much to qualify get little help.“It's insufficient in the current policy landscape because we still see lots of families, well up the income distribution, who face difficulties affording care,” Gibbs said.What it means to rely on a credit cardUnable to qualify for subsidies, Pamela Arciaga, a mother of a 4-year-old in Glendale, accrued about $20,000 in credit card debt because of her son’s preschool costs. As the sole earner for her household, she couldn’t afford a full-time preschool program, so her son attended three days a week at $1,000 a month. Her parents would help her watch her son on the days he wasn’t in school, driving all the way from Riverside and back.“What I relied on essentially was just my credit cards to pay for household groceries, sometimes to pay the water bill and power bill, because the preschool that he goes to, it's not as if I could have been on a payment plan, right? It was a monthly invoice that I had to pay so that he can stay in the program,” she said.Arciaga works in early childhood advocacy, and said she also knew the value of preschool education for kindergarten readiness. She saw it as a short-term sacrifice. “It was an investment for me to actually enroll him in preschool,” she said. But the cost is that she’s blown through her emergency savings and is working to pay her debt off now that her son started transitional kindergarten. She pays about $300 a month for after-school care now.“For emergencies, or anything like that, I still have to rely on the only credit card that I still have [with] a lot of credit on at this point or don't have a balance on,” she said.She said she wishes that elected officials paid more attention to the issue of childcare costs.“We have to work to keep the economy going,” Arciaga said. “However, we don't have any support, so it feels like we're paying double on, on top of taxes for not getting a lot of benefits.”How childcare costs affect families’ futuresFor Daniel Contreras and his wife, the cost of childcare has made them reimagine having a large family. “The reality sinks in pretty quickly when, you know, child number one comes in, and you're seeing your savings dissipate,” he said.When Contreras’ children, who are now 7 and 10, were in childcare full-time in Whittier, the family was paying about $3,000 a month. “It was a fourth of our checks, and we had a mortgage still to pay. We had other items, just to keep the lights on.”They couldn’t afford to save, and scaled back on buying new clothes for their kids. He said they avoided using credit cards to avoid falling into debt. His children are now older and in public school, but he said childcare still eats a large part of their monthly budget. After-school care costs $1,000 a month. “So we're still paycheck to paycheck,” Contreras said. “It's like a heavy weight that's being pushed down at this moment.” At times, he’d had to negotiate with his rental's management to avoid a late fee when behind on rent.He said he recently watched the gubernatorial debate and was disappointed not to hear very much about childcare.“I don't see anybody really pushing the envelope and supporting the workforce,” he said. “Because the workforce needs help.”Share your story