Childcare Costs in Arkansas (2024): What Full-Time Care Really Costs, by Source
Arkansas’s child care prices in this guide come from Child Care Aware of America’s “Child Care in America: 2024 Affordability Analysis,” based on a January 2025 survey of state Child Care Resource & Referral networks. This page shows real, survey-reported prices broken out by a child’s age and by care setting, rather than rough estimates. Arkansas’s figures were not flagged as backfilled in the source report, so they reflect current survey data rather than an older state Market Rate Survey.
Average annual price of full-time child care in Arkansas
| Age group | Center-based care | Family child care (home-based) |
|---|---|---|
| Infant | $9,178 · $765/mo | $7,963 · $664/mo |
| Toddler | $8,801 · $733/mo | $7,727 · $644/mo |
| 4-Year-Old | $8,320 · $693/mo | $7,745 · $645/mo |
| Before/After School | $3,397 · $283/mo | $4,274 · $356/mo |
| Full-Time Summer | $1,971 · $164/mo | $1,804 · $150/mo |
Arkansas’s prices were not asterisked in the source report, meaning they are fresh survey-reported figures from the current CCR&R survey, not backfilled from an older survey. Source: Child Care Aware of America, Tables I & II, “Child Care in America: 2024 Affordability Analysis.” A cell reading “Not reported” means CCAoA did not publish a price for that age group and setting in this state — it is not zero and was not estimated.
What this actually means for a family’s budget
A single infant in center-based care in Arkansas runs about $9,178 a year. For a family with two children in center-based care, that annual cost comes in about 60 percent more than the state’s annualized rent, and about 12 percent more than the annualized cost of a mortgage. Compared with the average in-state public college tuition and fees, the infant center price is actually about 9 percent lower, not higher. Measured against income, that infant center price works out to 9.1 percent of the state’s married-couple median income, but 28.9 percent of the single-parent median income.
National context
This is the flat 2023 U.S. national average annual wage for childcare workers (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, occupation code 39-9011), not a Arkansas-specific figure. CCAoA’s report applies this single national number when ranking every state’s childcare-workforce affordability, so it is NOT evidence about Arkansas wages specifically. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023 Annual Mean Wage: Childcare Workers, bls.gov/oes/current/oes399011.htm)
What we don’t have for Arkansas
The U.S. Department of Labor’s National Database of Childcare Prices would let us show county-by-county prices across Arkansas instead of one statewide number, and it is the stronger source for that kind of local detail. It could not be accessed for this page, so the figures here reflect only the statewide Child Care Aware of America data.
How we built this page
Every figure above comes from Child Care Aware of America’s published “Child Care in America: 2024 Affordability Analysis” report (Tables I, II, III, XI, and XII), which in turn cites U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2023 data for income and rent/mortgage figures, and BLS 2023 data for the national childcare-worker wage figure. Reused here under CCAoA’s own republishing terms, which require visible citation to Child Care Aware of America and a link to childcareaware.org — both are provided throughout this page.
- Child Care Aware of America, “Child Care in America: 2024 Affordability Analysis”. Prices from CCAoA’s January 2025 survey of Child Care Resource & Referral State Networks.
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023, Table B19126 (income) and related housing-cost tables.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023 Annual Mean Wage: Childcare Workers (occupation code 39-9011).
