The cost of child care in Mass. is among the highest in the country. But vouchers to assist families remain frozen. - The Boston Globe (2025)

Some families, including those involved with the Department of Children and Families or the Department of Transitional Assistance, are still receiving aid, as required by state law. But for parents like Tower, the wait list is daunting.

“I’m looking at, if I don’t get that voucher, waiting until my son goes to school, which makes me broke for another couple years,” said Tower, who will have to continue relying on rental assistance, food banks, toy drives, and other social safety nets to get by until she can work. “It’s almost impossible to get out of this low-income hole.”

The demand for subsidies is partly due to an unprecedented increase in DCF and DTA cases as the rising cost of living pushes more families to the brink of financial hardship — and because the system has expanded to provide care to more children than it used to.

The state more than doubled its investment over the past five years as lawmakers shored up early education following the pandemic, becoming the only state to fully maintain COVID-era relief funds after federal dollars ran out. This surge in funding, including increasing reimbursement rates for subsidized care, gave child-care providers the ability to open more classrooms and increase teachers’ pay. These improvements helped add more than 17,000 more seats in the past two years, beyond pre-pandemic capacity, many in disadvantaged communities where struggling families qualify for financial assistance.

When it became clear that the state had maxed out its subsidies for income-eligible families, it froze the wait list in March 2024. Since then, the number of children in line for financial assistance has jumped by more than 50 percent.

Last year, the Legislature approved expanding the eligibility requirements to allow more families to qualify for child-care subsidies, which would ease the burden on lower-middle-class households. But this proposed regulation change, which is currently in the public comment phase, would create even more demand. Under the current policy, households that earn less than half the state median income — up to nearly $79,000 for a family of four — qualify to apply for income-eligible funding, but that could rise to those making 85 percent.

The cost of child care in Massachusetts is among the highest in the country, with families paying an average of nearly $20,000 a year for a toddler, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private Baltimore-based philanthropy focused on strengthening families.

Kim Dion has been connecting families with child-care providers for 37 years at Seven Hills Child Care Resources in Worcester, and she’s never seen the need for assistance so high.

“I have families in my region that have been on the wait list since the summer of 2022,” she said. “Those kids are going to be in public schools before I can get them a voucher.”

Governor Maura Healey proposed $1.1 billion for child-care financial assistance in the fiscal year 2026 budget, a $192 million increase over the current fiscal year. But that would only subsidize new DCF and DTA cases and other families already being served by the system — not those on the income-eligible wait list.

“We aren’t anticipating at this funding level that we would be able to open up access to the income-eligible wait list,” said Amy Kershaw, commissioner of the Department of Early Education and Care, which administers subsidies, at a legislative hearing in late March.

At a recent EEC board meeting, Kershaw, who served as DTA commissioner at the height of the pandemic and previously worked at DCF, said caseloads were in a time of “pretty significant flux.” More slots have been added for priority populations, such as homeless families, and shifted to infants, where need has increased over the years — both of which cost more to provide.

The system is so strained that the governor recently asked the Legislature for an additional $190 million to make it through the end of June.

The Massachusetts Association of Early Education and Care and other advocates have also appealed to the Legislature to allocate more money in the next fiscal year to help waiting families. An additional $32 million could get 2,000 children off the wait list, said William Eddy, executive director of the early education trade association.

“We must find a way to serve children of low-income working families who are languishing on our wait list,” he said at the legislative hearing. “Thirty-thousand children should be unacceptable.”

The state funding squeeze is unfolding, and at the same time, the Trump administration is making massive cuts, including closing the Boston Head Start office, which administers free care to families in need. At this point, there’s no indication that federal grants that help fund state child-care subsidies will be added to the chopping block, said Adam Jones, senior policy analyst at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. But all the cutbacks might make it difficult for early education to get additional investments.

Some home-based providers — many of them women of color who rely heavily on low-income families — are struggling to maintain enrollment and their income, given the lack of vouchers. Providers that contract with the Guild of St. Agnes in Worcester are serving 10 percent fewer children than they were a year ago, largely due to the lack of vouchers and the lack of families who can afford to pay out of pocket, said president Sharon MacDonald

Nurtury Early Education, which serves 1,100 children in the Boston area — almost all of them eligible for financial assistance — has a wait list of home-based providers who want to join Nurtury’s system but can’t until more vouchers are issued.

“Small businesses are the backbone of child care,” said Nurtury president Laura Perille. “They are one of the few growing sources of supply.”

A number of centers are also struggling to get to full capacity because so many teachers, who make around $40,000 a year, qualify for vouchers for their own children but are stuck on the wait list and can’t work.

Torah Academy decided to invest in early education after the state expanded income eligibility, knowing the demand for vouchers would grow. The Jewish school converted a two-family home in Brighton into a child-care center, and is set to open this spring. But five of its seven teachers are marooned on the wait list, and the school had to turn to private donors to fund their children’s spots at Torah Academy, said Rabbi Binyomin Mermelstein, the school’s executive director.

“This is very basic,” he said. “If there’s no teachers, there’s no programs.”

Deborah Dailey worked at a child-care center in Springfield for almost four years before she went on maternity leave last year when her son, Nathien, was born. She applied for a voucher in February, but only found out about the freeze when she was getting ready to return to work in mid-April.

“I was in total shock,” said Dailey, 38. “I really can’t afford to take a leave.”

Without a voucher, she said, returning to her low-paid, highly rewarding career teaching young children seems impossible.

This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.