How to cost-effectively reach more children with high-quality care
Just Fix It is Vital City’s running look at concrete, nonideological ways to unstick the gears of city government and make it work better for all New Yorkers.
Free universal childcare for children as young as 6 weeks old was a signature plank of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s platform, and the appeal is obvious: Childcare is one of New York City parents’ biggest expenses, and one of the most daunting hurdles to living here. A report by the Fiscal Policy Institute found families with children 5 and under are twice as likely to leave the city as other households.Universal childcare in New York City would build on what is an already extensive early childhood education system. Since 2014, every 4-year-old in the city has been eligible for pre-K, and in 2017, many 3-year-olds became eligible for 3-K. Last year, about 100,000 of the city’s roughly 175,000 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in those programs. (That count of children comes from the Census Bureau's official population estimates, which the State Comptroller also uses; the Bureau's household survey puts it nearer to 191,000.) A separate program offers vouchers for childcare to more than 90,000 children of lower-income families from 6 weeks to 12 years old — whether before, during or after 3-K and pre-K placements — at a cost of about $1.8 billion per year in federal, State and City funds.
Still, almost half of 3- and 4-year-olds are not enrolled in a City-provided childcare slot. Some families are handling care on their own. But other parents couldn’t find a convenient location, or the roughly six-hour, 180-day program didn’t cover their families’ real needs, or word of the opportunity simply never reached them. The voucher program reaches barely one in nine children under 5, leaving most families to cobble together coverage on their own.
This city’s childcare system — 3-K and pre-K, contracted infant-and-toddler care and the under-5 share of the voucher program — is delivered by a complicated patchwork of providers that includes public schools as well as contractors from community-based nonprofits to individuals working out of their own homes. All told, caring for kids before kindergarten outside their homes costs the public about $3.2 billion a year. The City draws on at least $1 billion of its own tax dollars, and the balance comes from federal block-grant funds and state pre-K aid, leaving the system leaning on allocations that don't grow with need.
Mamdani is seeking to do more than just add seats. He wants to make care free to any family that wants it (rather than means-tested and conditioned on parents' work hours, as the voucher system is today), to raise caregivers’ salaries to attract and retain more talent and to extend the hours of some pre-K and 3-K programs to better meet parents’ needs.
So far, the mayor has taken small steps towards his ambitious vision, committing $5.2 million to eliminate the weekly copays some voucher families still pay and announcing a partnership with Gov. Kathy Hochul to fully fund 3-K and start enrolling 2-year-olds — in most cases for 10 hours a day, 260 days a year. The first 2,000 seats are clustered in four communities chosen for economic need and where providers were ready to launch, with 10,000 more due in fall 2027. But even that would enroll only around 13% of 2-year-olds.
The main reason it is difficult to expand childcare in New York City is that it is very costly: On average, the City’s early childhood system runs nearly $20,000 per child, according to the New York State Comptroller. Covering children 2 and under, who need closer supervision and therefore a higher ratio of caregivers to charges, will likely come at an even higher price. Experts estimate achieving universal childcare for all New York City children 6 weeks to 5years old will cost somewhere between $7 billion and $9 billion a year. That’s more than double the funds committed right now, and there is no dedicated funding stream to fill the gap.
The City will have to invest if it wants to expand access, but it should seek efficiencies and savings as it grows these services to reach the most children with high-quality services. This column lays out six immediate actions City Hall should take.
1) Streamline inspections for childcare sites and background checks for staff.
The problem: Opening a childcare center means clearing separate reviews by three City agencies and State-mandated background checks for every staff member, a pipeline slow enough to threaten the City's 2-K expansion.
The Mamdani administration should: Send joint inspection teams to childcare sites, the way the City did to launch pre-K in 2014, and back the Council bill that lets cleared staff carry their background checks between jobs.
The fine print: The City requires each childcare center to be inspected by the Health and Fire Departments and obtain a certification from the Department of Buildings before it can operate. Each review is sensible alone but together they are convoluted (as they are for housing, the topic of a previous column). Nothing in law requires the inspections to run one after another, but each agency schedules its own and in practice they run on separate calendars, with no obligation to agree. A provider can pass one agency's inspection only to fail another's a week later and be forced to start again. The costs of the idle months — rent on an empty space, staff waiting to start — end up in the prices parents and taxpayers pay.
City Hall recently launched a centralized permitting portal for center-based childcare providers; family childcare programs have to use a separate portal. Building on this effort, City Hall should have inspectors coordinate their work. The City has done this before, at scale: To open hundreds of pre-K sites in eight months in 2014, teams from the Buildings, Health, Fire and Education departments ran some 6,000 joint inspections and walk-throughs. Such visits give a provider one answer, on site, instead of three answers delivered later that can contradict each other.
The same logic applies to people. Federal law requires every childcare center employee to undergo a background check as a condition of childcare funding, and the State runs them. Those checks are supposed to clear within 45 days, but hundreds don't. The City promised 2,000 free 2-K seats by September, and at an oversight hearing this spring the Council fretted about whether the background-check pipeline could keep up. Majority Leader Shaun Abreu has a bill that would let a cleared worker carry their check between childcare jobs for five years instead of restarting it with every hire. (The State keeps workers' fingerprints on file regardless, and automatically flags any new arrest to regulators.) The Health Department has already adopted a version of this by internal policy; Abreu's bill would write it into law.
2) Amend the “ground-floor tax.”
The problem: An outdated City health rule confines care for children under 2 to the ground floor and caps all childcare at the third floor, though alternative measures could make cheaper upper-floor space safe.
The Mamdani administration should: Amend the second-floor occupancy rule so long as childcare sites meet safety standards in other ways.
The fine print: New York City's Health Code generally confines childcare for children under 2 to the ground floor of a building, and caps all childcare at the third floor. There’s a certain logic to the rule: Infants cannot walk down stairs in a fire, so evacuating them means staff carrying them, one or two at a time. Floor limits like this entered American building codes in the 1960s, when sprinklers were rare and an upper-story nursery was a genuine hazard. The City adopted its current version in 2008, in the Health Department's words, “to facilitate evacuation of the youngest children in emergencies.”
But in New York, ground-floor commercial space is much more expensive than comparable second-floor space, a premium set by retailers competing for foot traffic that childcare providers are forced to pay whether they need the storefront or not.
The City already shows there are better ways to balance safety and affordability. The Health Department will approve childcare for upper floors when the Buildings Department and Fire Department sign off on sprinklers on every floor between the children and the street, two separate ways out, an interior alarm and an approved evacuation plan. That is also where the International Building Code has landed. The problem is that in New York City this standard is available only as an exception.
The rest of New York State never adopted a flat floor rule at all; the State requires only that any floor where children are cared for have adequate escape routes. Toronto shows what an alternative can look like: The city's official childcare design guideline assumes centers may span more than one story, in which case they need a dedicated elevator sized for a triple stroller.
Some New York City providers manage to maneuver through the Health, Buildings and Fire departments to get higher-floor locations approved through a special waiver, but the regulation largely confines care for the youngest children to the ground floor — the most expensive space in any building. And the third-floor cap limits where 2-K classrooms can go.
As the Real Estate Board of New York and the 5BORO Institute urged in 2024, the City should rewrite the rule so that space meeting the waiver's existing safety standards is simply permitted, with no site-by-site petition required. Providers already know what safe looks like; what they need is a rule that says meeting the standard is enough.
3) Collect State childcare money the City is leaving on the table.
The problem: As of July 2026, more than 27,000 children sat on the waitlist for childcare vouchers while State matching funds go partly unclaimed, money the City can collect at a rate of roughly 15 State dollars for every new dollar the City invests.
The Mamdani administration should: Spend the last few million dollars needed to claim the full $350 million in State matching funds before the federal fiscal year ends September 30, then start to process the waitlist and budget enough to claim another $475 million in State money next year.
The fine print: New York State’s Child Care Assistance Program gives low-income families — those earning up to 85% of the state median income, about $116,000 for a family of four — vouchers covering nearly the full cost of care for children as young as 6 weeks and as old as 12 at a provider of their choosing, including in the hours before and after a 3-K day. Of the roughly $1.5 billion the program will spend this year, about $1.1 billion is federal and State block-grant money, and the City is required to contribute roughly $330 million, about a quarter of the total.
The program is a victim of its own success. After the State expanded eligibility, the City enrolled aggressively, with numbers growing from about 7,500 children on income-based vouchers in 2022 to roughly 71,000 as of early 2026. But the block-grant allocation is set annually and does not grow with enrollment. So when the City spent through the allocation, it had to stop accepting new applicants: It has not enrolled a single new family since May 2025, outside those it must serve by law — not for lack of space at providers, but for lack of funds — and the waitlist now exceeds 27,000 children.
"This has been a huge issue, especially for family childcare programs, which are the most likely type of programs to accept vouchers," said Lara Kyriakou, senior director of policy for All Our Kin, a nonprofit that trains and supports home-based childcare providers. “It has had a real impact on programs’ ability to continue to have full enrollment.”
Albany has already offered help, with a catch. This year's State budget puts up $350 million in extra voucher money for New York City — a supplement on top of the regular block grant — but only if the City matches the sum. The $328 million it is already required to spend on the program counts toward that, leaving just $22 million in genuinely new money. As of June, the City had claimed less than a third of the State’s total offer, though officials said the City planned to claim the remaining $245 million by the September deadline. A similar deal, on stiffer terms, awaits next year. These are the cheapest dollars the City will ever find.
Collecting those funds will not by itself clear the waitlist — the Center for New York City Affairs estimates that it would take roughly $500 million more in City funds just to cut it in half — but it’s a start.
4) Shorten notification periods for 3-K.
The problem: Parents applying to 3-K and pre-K wait nearly three months to learn which program will take their child, whereas the same enrollment system answers kindergarten families in weeks.
The Mamdani administration should: Hasten timelines for enrollment and make sure both public and private providers are on the same page.
The fine print: When applications opened for 3-K and pre-K in January of this year, more than 50,000 families applied in the first two weeks. Then they had to wait and wait and wait. The application window closed February 27 and offers didn't arrive until May 19. This year, about 70% of 3-K applicants got their first choice, and 1 in 8 families was assigned a program they hadn't listed at all — better than last year, but a long time to wait for an answer many families couldn't use. Parents weighing private options often must pay deposits months before the City tells them whether they'll need them, and families planning work schedules, commutes and moves are often forced to do so blind.
None of this is inevitable, and the City's own enrollment system shows it. Kindergarten families who applied by their January deadline received offers on March 31 — six or seven weeks earlier than 3-K and pre-K families, run by the same office on the same platform.
In coordination with City Hall’s childcare team, the Department of Education (DOE) should move up its admissions calendar, with notifications largely sent out by the end of March before families decamp for spring break, which is similar to the schedule met for kindergartners. The Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education should also work with private providers to align processes and contracts, automate technology and set earlier deadlines, so parents aren't forced to pay for a seat they may never use.
5) Offer alternatives to fulfilling the master's degree requirement for early childhood teachers.
The problem: New York requires that teachers earn a master's degree to keep their certification, with scant evidence to justify it.
The Mamdani administration should: Press Albany to open alternate routes to keeping certification that other states already employ — including experience, demonstrated competency or targeted coursework — so that a master's degree is no longer the only path.
The fine print: By one estimate, the City must bring on some 30,000 additional childcare workers to staff a universal system. Although some roles are not subject to a master’s degree requirement, including assistants, aides, and home-based providers, every City-funded 3-K and pre-K classroom must be led by a state-certified teacher.
New York is one of only two states, along with Connecticut, that require teachers to earn a master's degree to hold a permanent teaching certificate. A new teacher's certificate lasts five years, and the only way to convert it into a permanent one is the degree — no exam, experience or coursework will substitute. New York has already conceded the bar is too high: since 2023, it has allowed teachers who haven't finished the degree to renew the entry-level certificate up to twice more rather than lose them.
There is little evidence the requirement enhances child outcomes.
The canonical study, pooling seven major datasets on pre-K programs, found “largely null or contradictory” associations between teachers’ education levels and both classroom quality and children's learning. A 2017 meta-analysis of the full literature reached the same conclusion, finding staff education was "not a key driver of child outcomes." The National Academies' landmark workforce report recommends a bachelor's as the standard.
The master's rule is the sharpest example of a broader pattern. Lead teaching roles in the city's contracted classrooms — where average pay runs about $44,000 — also require a bachelor's degree plus state certification, a hurdle for the nearly 2.5 million working-age New Yorkers who lack a four-year degree. Families across the city, in contrast, happily entrust their children to nannies and caregivers who hold none. Each requirement narrows the pool of people who can do this work, and the obstacles feed the turnover that costs parents and providers alike.
The State need not abolish the master's route to fix this; it needs to stop making it the only route. Teachers should be able to keep their certification through supervised experience, demonstrated competency in the classroom or targeted early-childhood coursework. For example, New Mexico advances teachers to its top license tier — including those licensed for birth through pre-K — through six years of classroom experience plus National Board certification, a master's being just one option.
Meanwhile, DOE and the State's Office of Children and Family Services should look hard at which of their remaining credential rules actually protect children and which merely gatekeep.
This would widen the pipeline into a workforce the City must grow, and spare new teachers the cost of a degree their salary can't repay. How to better compensate childcare workers is its own hard question. Mamdani has promised to pursue pay parity between childcare providers and K-12 public school teachers, meaning equivalent pay rates for both. It’s important that this workforce be better paid, to ensure high-quality childcare and minimize worker turnover and for their dignity above all, but pay parity would lock the City into a specific, steep pay increase, driving per pupil costs sharply higher precisely as the City seeks to deliver services to many more children.
The point of amending the master’s degree requirement is not a cheaper workforce — that is why existing educators should be grandfathered. The City should also expand its CUNY partnerships for those who want the degree. And it should take up the Day Care Council’s proposal for a City-funded apprenticeship pairing aspiring educators with existing programs, as Honolulu, Santa Fe and Kalamazoo already offer, and accelerated credit-for-experience programs for thousands of New Yorkers already working as nannies and babysitters. The point is that a rule with little measurable payoff is standing between the City and the hires it needs.
6) Accelerate payments to early childcare providers.
The problem: The City takes far too long to pay childcare providers.
The Mamdani administration should: Go beyond the emergency hiring. Reduce the materials childcare sites need to submit to seek reimbursement, advance providers half their contract value as soon as it is registered, give every provider a named case manager and adopt new technologies to process invoices faster.
The fine print: The City’s childcare system depends on public subsidies to stay afloat, but those payments have long been plagued by delays. The stretched timelines grew even longer as the City launched universal pre-K, and did not improve in the following years. It often goes unstated but the childcare workforce is disproportionately low income, minority and female, exacerbating the feeling of injustice when payments are delayed as much as a year. Some childcare sites have been forced to take out loans, cut staff or close, stranding families without options. Two weeks before the first 2-K classrooms were due to open this September, many providers had still received no City money, and City Hall conceded the delays were “unacceptable.”
On Aug. 31, ten days before school opened, Mayor Mamdani announced $43 million for the Education Department’s Division of Early Childhood Education, pledged to triple its contracting staff and promised to process approved loan applications by the end of the week. That is a real commitment, and it will set more hands to the same process and issue loans faster. But hiring at that scale takes months, and those staff will not likely be in place before late winter.
The Adams administration also assigned a “rapid response” team to tackle a backlog of childcare provider payments that had ballooned to $400 million by 2022, but it didn’t get far.
Other nonprofits under contract to the City are routinely advanced half the value of an agreement once it is registered, and the Council wrote a version of that requirement into law. DOE’s childcare providers largely do not receive it.
Part of the problem is paperwork. DOE must finalize a provider’s contract, which can take legal review. It then has to approve a budget, down to the dollar. The contract has to then be registered with the Comptroller’s Office. And finally, the DOE has to certify its classroom roster. Altogether, experts say the process can drag halfway through the school year before any payments are issued. Adding staff moves that sequence along faster; it does not shorten it.
Throughout the process, the provider has to submit these sensitive documents to a nameless DOE email, without a singular point of contact to offer guidance on submissions or move the process along. On top of that, experts say DOE has too few staff administering childcare. Nor has the City said where in that sequence the delays concentrate: how many contracts remain unregistered, how many of those await the provider rather than the City and how many providers hold a registered contract but have not invoiced against it. Publishing those counts each month would show families whether the backlog is shrinking, and show City Hall where to put its people.
The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services should work with the Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education and DOE to streamline the documents providers submit to get reimbursed, so that the process is less burdensome while still providing information necessary to ensure the integrity of the vendors. The new hiring should be aimed at that, with enough staff in DOE’s early childhood division that each provider is assigned a case manager for help with paperwork and payments. Until those hires arrive, the Mayor’s Office of Operations, which has run this kind of cross-agency push before, should convene the offices that touch these contracts and clear the backlog on a fixed timetable, reporting progress weekly. Going forward, this might be a task for the City’s new “PIT” crews, which can explore leveraging AI to accelerate approvals.
This installment was prepared with the help of John Surico.
