Raising a child in New York

Closely, and that is the check everything else rests on. The Bureau’s 2024 table reports 516,012 own children under six: 325,117 living with two parents (211,677 with both in the labor force, 91,369 with only the father, 17,402 with only the mother, 4,669 with neither) and 190,895 living with one parent (117,929 with a mother in the labor force, 40,555 with a mother who is not, 30,113 and 2,298 for fathers). Rebuilding the same rows from the 2024 microdata gives 512,908, 321,266, 211,008, 89,374, 17,988, 2,896, 191,642, 118,500, 40,202, 31,255 and 1,685, each inside the published margin of error . The 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 tables reproduce the same way, fourteen rows a year. The full comparison is in the Reproduce box and the reproduction table. Everything the table does not print, the ages, the boroughs, the incomes, the preschools, the nannies and the leavers, is built on the same records.

The published table, and the seven-in-ten figure built on it, count children living with at least one parent, as the child of the householder or in a subfamily: 512,908 of the 543,082 residents under six in the 2024 microdata. The other 30,000 or so are children in households headed by a grandparent, another relative or a non-relative without a parent present, about 26,000 or 4.8% of household children under six, and a few thousand in group quarters. Their parents’ employment is not on their record, so they cannot be sorted. Counted against all 543,082 under-sixes, the children with every resident parent in the labor force are about two thirds rather than seven in ten.

In 2024 Brooklyn had about 188,000 children under six, Queens 147,000, the Bronx 103,000, Manhattan 76,000 and Staten Island 30,000. As a share of each borough’s residents that is 7.2% in Brooklyn and 7.4% in the Bronx against 4.5% in Manhattan. Households with a child under six numbered 341,000, one household in ten citywide, from 12.8% of Bronx households to 5.9% of Manhattan’s. Their median incomes in 2024 dollars: Manhattan $258,000, Staten Island $126,000, Queens $113,000, Brooklyn $101,000, the Bronx $58,000. Counting children rather than households, 23% of the under-sixes live below the poverty line, 37% in the Bronx and 12% on Staten Island, and 70% live in rented homes, 81% in the Bronx and 39% on Staten Island. In 2015 there were 413,000 households with a child under six, 13% of all households, with a median income of $96,000 in 2024 dollars.

Mostly a mother, and often born abroad; income matters less than the first cut suggests. Of the roughly 90,000 parents of children under six who were out of the labor force in 2024, 84% were mothers. Sorted by household income, the share of mothers whose youngest is under six who are out of the labor force runs from 44% in households under $25,000 through 36%, 37%, 23% and 14% to 12% above $200,000. That measure contains the mother’s own earnings, so it partly sorts mothers by whether they work. Sorted instead by the income of the rest of the household, hers excluded, the shares are 21% under $25,000, 37% at $25,000 to $50,000, 35% at $50,000 to $100,000, 22% at $100,000 to $150,000, 24% at $150,000 to $200,000, 22% at $200,000 to $300,000 and 21% above $300,000: a hump in the middle and about a fifth at both ends. In 2015 the same series was 26%, 41%, 43%, 31%, 29%, 37% and 43%, so the fall since then is steepest at the top, from 43% to 21% where the rest of the household earns more than $300,000; those two figures rest on 217 and 193 mothers and carry margins of about six and a half and six points, so the decade’s fall is well clear of sampling noise. By borough the 2024 share ran from 32% in the Bronx and 30% in Queens to 20% in Manhattan; by race or ethnicity, about a third among Hispanic and Asian mothers and a fifth among white and Black mothers; 33% among foreign-born mothers against 21% among US-born ones. Fathers of small children are out of the labor force about 6% of the time, a share that has not moved, and mothers whose youngest child is under six are employed 68% of the time, against 60% in 2015. None of this says why a parent is at home; the census records the status, not the reason.

The census asks every woman aged 15 to 50 whether she gave birth in the past twelve months, which finds about 90,000 new mothers in 2024. Of them 70% were in the labor force, 64% were employed and half were working 35 hours or more, and the median new mother was 33. In 2015 the figures were 63%, 57% and 41%. Someone on paid family leave from a job is employed in the census’s terms, so the employment share measures attachment to a job rather than hours at a desk in the baby’s first months, and it says nothing about who is with the baby. This is the one measure here that is asked of women who actually had a child in the year, rather than of different mothers whose youngest children happen to be different ages.

Nobody knows from the census, and only partly from anything else. The census does not ask about care arrangements, so what it offers is the parents’ side only: of children under three living with a parent, seven in ten have every resident parent in the labor force, and about three quarters of mothers whose youngest is under three are in it. A parent in the labor force may be on leave, working from home, working a shift the other parent does not, or looking for work, so none of that says a child is in paid care. The national household education survey, which does ask, found in 2019 that 42% of American children under one and 55% of one- and two-year-olds were in at least one weekly nonparental care arrangement, relatives included; it publishes nothing for New York City. On the supply side the State Comptroller’s January 2026 report counts what the City pays for: about 6,400 children in the Department of Education’s infant and toddler programs, with 4,100 seats unfilled, and about 26,400 infant and toddler vouchers, which together reach about 13% of the city’s under-threes; the City Comptroller put voucher coverage at 29% of the roughly 108,000 income-eligible infants and toddlers in September 2024. Monthly vouchers in use by children under five rose from 29,615 in the 2023 fiscal year to 52,027 in 2025 and 64,129 in the first four months of 2026, and new vouchers for families not on cash assistance were paused in May 2025. From September 2026 the City’s first 2-K classes add about 2,000 free full-day seats for two-year-olds in school districts 6, 10, 18, 23 and 27 (Washington Heights and Inwood, the north-west Bronx, Canarsie and Brownsville, and Ozone Park and Richmond Hill); applications ran from 2 to 26 June, more than 5,700 families applied, and the City has said it will serve about 12,000 children in 2027. Everyone else is with a parent, a relative, a nanny, a babysitter, an unlicensed provider, or a licensed one paid privately, in proportions no public dataset measures.

The census records enrolment, not the program, so what it shows is public enrolment of three-year-olds rising from 23% in 2015 to 29% in 2019 and 44% in 2024, while private enrolment stayed near a fifth and the share not enrolled fell from 56% to 34%; the rise coincides with the City’s 3-K expansion, and the census cannot attribute any child’s seat to it. Four-year-olds were already mostly in school after pre-K for all: 81% enrolled in 2015 and 83% in 2024, with the public share up from 55% to 68% and the private share down from 26% to 15%. By borough, public enrolment of three-year-olds in 2024 ran from 38% in Manhattan and 39% in Brooklyn to 52% in the Bronx and 55% on Staten Island. By income, enrolment of three-year-olds is highest at the top, 87% above $300,000, and lowest between $25,000 and $50,000, at 51%, where a parent is more often at home. The State Comptroller’s administrative count for the 2025 fiscal year is consistent: 44,729 three-year-olds in 3-K, 53% of the age group, with 7,988 seats unfilled, and 56,184 in pre-K with 15,181 unfilled; it notes that the three-year-old population fell from 106,656 in 2020 to 85,059 in 2024, which raised the enrolment rate without adding children. The school register for 2025-26 shows 39,229 in 3-K and 55,497 in pre-K.

The published rates are the State’s ceilings for subsidised care in the five boroughs from October 2024: $500 a week for an infant in a day care centre, $450 for a toddler, $439 for a three- or four-year-old and $325 for a school-age child; $400, $350, $325 and $289 in a family or group family day care home. Times 52 weeks, as the City Comptroller states them, that is $26,000, $23,400, $22,828 and $16,900 in a centre and $20,800 in a home for an infant. The Comptroller’s own averages for 2024, from the same survey, were $26,000 for centre-based infant and toddler care and $18,200 for family-based care, up 43% and 79% since 2019, and it calculated that a family needs $334,000 to keep toddler centre care within 7% of income. The 7% line comes from the federal child-care subsidy rule of March 2024, which capped co-payments for subsidised families at that share of family income; the federal government rescinded the cap with effect from 13 July 2026, and the line is used here as the conventional yardstick it has become, not as a current requirement. Against the census family incomes of households whose youngest child is under three (about 166,000 households, median family income $108,000), the infant centre rate is within 7% of income for 13%, within 10% for 21%, within 20% for 45% and within 30% for 59%; the family day care rate for 18%, 27%, 53% and 66%. By borough, the 7% test passes for 44% of Manhattan’s families with a child under three, 14% of Brooklyn’s, 8% of Queens’, 4% of Staten Island’s and under 1% of the Bronx’s. Family income is the income of the householder and everyone related to them by birth, marriage or adoption, the measure the benchmark is defined on; it leaves out an unmarried partner, who may well be the child’s other parent. Using the whole household’s income instead, which brings the partner back in along with roommates and other unrelated adults, moves each share up by about a point (14%, 22%, 47% and 61% for the centre rate). What a family pays is a different number: subsidies, sibling discounts, part-time places, nanny shares and grandparents all lower it, and the census measures none of them.

 

Measured

 

How to read this, and what it cannot show

Children aged one to five who lived in the city a year earlier, by where they live now, 2015, 2019 and 2024, with 90% margins. Cells resting on fewer than 30 records are not drawn.

More than the census finds. The 11,461 residents it counts as childcare workers employed by private households, with a margin of about 3,000, are the people who told the survey that their job is childcare and their employer is a household; that leaves out anyone who described the work differently, anyone who commutes in from outside the city, and some share of a workforce that is often paid in cash and often not a citizen. Treat the count as a floor and the profile as a sketch with wide margins: 99% women, 60% born abroad, 27% not citizens, a median age of 44, a median of 40 hours a week, a third self-employed, a fifth below the poverty line, and a median household income of $72,000. Their reported earnings, about $17 an hour and $33,000 a year at the median, are what respondents said they made, on or off the books, and include part-time babysitters; the rate a Brooklyn family pays an experienced full-time nanny is higher, and no public survey measures it citywide. Day care workers, 19,489 of them in 2024, report a median of $14 an hour and $20,000 a year, and 37% are below the poverty line; preschool and kindergarten teachers working in day care centres, 12,564, report $24 an hour and $49,000. The number of day care workers the census finds fell from 36,000 in 2015 to 19,000 in 2024, with a margin of about 4,000 on each, a fall that coincides with the move of three- and four-year-olds into DOE-run classrooms. Some of the measured decline could reflect workers shifting into school settings, where the census would file the same job under a different industry and occupation; the cross-sections cannot show whether that happened. The profile shares above also rest on the same 75 records: the foreign-born share carries a margin of about 14 points and the self-employed and non-citizen shares about 10, so read them as a sketch, not a census. The City Comptroller’s count of 32,917 employed child care workers, from the 2023 survey, sits between the 38,000 counted here across all settings and the 31,000 outside schools.

In 2024 about 19,700 children aged one to five who had lived in the city a year earlier were living elsewhere in the United States, 4.3% of the age group, against 14,200 six-to-twelve-year-olds (2.2%) and 10,500 teenagers (2.2%); adults aged 25 to 44 left at 5.3% and adults over 45 at 1.9%. Among adults aged 25 to 44, those who now live with children left at 4.1% and those who now do not at 5.8%; because the household is recorded after any move, that compares people by the household they ended up in, not by whether they were parents before leaving, so it does not measure whether families or the childless were readier to go. By the borough they lived in, one-to-five-year-olds left Manhattan at 6.1%, the Bronx at 4.6%, Brooklyn at 4.3% and Queens at 3.3%, with Staten Island resting on too few records to say; by race or ethnicity, white children at 5.2%, Hispanic and Asian children at about 4% and Black children at 2.8%. The rates were 3.3% in 2015 and 4.8% in 2019, and the decade’s peak was in the 2020 and 2021 files, near 6%. Half of the 2024 young leavers went to the suburbs, about 3,500 each to the Lower Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey and 2,800 to Long Island; Florida took 946, Pennsylvania 916, the rest of the South 1,800 and the Midwest 1,500. The households the leaving children now live in are owner-occupied 52% of the time against 31% for the children who stayed, have a median income of $130,000 against $94,000, and are above $150,000 39% of the time against 35%; those are the households at the destination, which the census records, not the ones the families left, which it does not. The rates by household income now rest on eleven to twenty-nine leaver records a band and show no clear gradient. Arrivals ran the other way in smaller numbers: about 6,300 one-to-five-year-olds came from elsewhere in the country and 7,800 from abroad, for a net domestic loss of about 13,400 in the age group.

The Bureau’s under-five estimates come in two vintages that the Bureau says not to combine, so each is read on its own. Within Vintage 2020, built on the 2010 census, the five boroughs’ under-fives went from 563,827 in July 2015 to 510,972 in July 2020, a fall of 9.4%, spread almost evenly across Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan and barely touching Staten Island. Within Vintage 2025, built on the 2020 census, they went from 508,585 in July 2020 to 473,562, 456,422, 454,017, 463,236 and 459,741 in the Julys of 2021 to 2025, a fall of 9.6% over the five years, all of it by 2022; Manhattan fell 15.6% in that vintage, the Bronx 8.9%, Brooklyn 9.5%, Queens 7.8% and Staten Island 5.1%. The 2024 uptick coincides with the arrivals from abroad described in the migration piece. The Health Department’s count of live births to city residents fell from 121,673 in 2015 to 110,442 in 2019, dropped to 100,022 in 2020 and has stayed just under 100,000 since, 98,389 in 2023, the latest year published. The public-school register reaches furthest: kindergarten enrolment including charter schools was 68,828 in 2021-22, 67,276, 69,155 and 67,636 in the three years after, and 64,536 in 2025-26, the smallest cohort of the five; first grade with charters was 67,791 in 2025-26 against 70,546 four years earlier. The 2025 census file, which would carry the survey’s own view of 2025, has been delayed past its usual September release with no date announced.

 

Administrative

 

How to read this, and what it cannot show

One bar per year, registered live births to residents of the five boroughs wherever they occurred, from the Health Department’s Summary of Vital Statistics 2023. No margin.

 

Administrative

 

How to read this, and what it cannot show

One bar per school year, from the Department of Education’s audited register. Kindergarten is shown with and without charter schools; 3-K and pre-K are the DOE’s district and community-based seats.

Who minds a child under three on a weekday, and what the family pays for it. Why a parent is at home. Which parent a child belongs to, since the census records relationships to the householder only. Any mother followed from one year to the next: every age-of-youngest-child comparison is between different mothers. Nannies who live outside the city or describe their job another way. Anything below the borough. Why any family left, and what its household earned before it did. Infants in the migration flows, since the question is asked from age one. The 2-K seats and anything else after the 2024 survey. The year 2025 in the census, which is not yet published.

This is the methods note for everything above. It is deliberately more technical than the rest.

The published anchor. Census table B23008, own children under 18 in families and subfamilies by living arrangement and the employment status of parents, for New York city from the one-year survey: 2019 from the Bureau’s sequence-format summary file (sequence 101, start position 66), 2021 to 2023 from the table-based summary files, 2024 from the Census Reporter mirror. Fourteen rows are reproduced each year: own children under 18, under 6 and 6 to 17; and among the under-sixes, living with two parents, both in the labor force, father only, mother only, neither; living with one parent, with father in and not in the labor force, with mother in and not in the labor force; and among 6-to-17-year-olds, two parents both in the labor force. In the microdata the universe is children under 18 with a non-blank parents’-employment code (ESP), which the Bureau assigns to own children of the householder and to children in subfamilies, and each row is one code or a set of them. Every share built on that code, including the seven-in-ten, has that universe as its denominator; counts of all children under six include the rest.

Residents. The 2015 to 2024 one-year public-use microdata samples for New York, cut to the 55 microdata areas of the five boroughs, with 80 replicate weights per person and per housing unit, joined to their housing records for household income, family income, tenure, gross rent as a share of income, bedrooms and the presence of children. Children are residents under 18 (about 15,000 to 17,000 records a year); households are occupied housing units in the five boroughs (about 30,000 a year), with the housing unit’s replicate weights.

Derived variables. Arrangement groups the parents’-employment code: both in the labor force (code 1); two parents, one not in the labor force (2 and 3); neither (4); one parent in the labor force (5 and 7); one parent not (6 and 8); children under 18 in households with a blank code are not living with a parent. All resident parents in the labor force is codes 1, 5 and 7; a parent at home is 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8. A parent, for the adult measures, is a person with relationship code 20 to 24 (householder, spouse or partner) aged 16 or over in a household containing a child of the householder (codes 25 to 27) under 18; the youngest child’s age is the minimum age of those children. Employed is employment status 1, 2, 4 or 5; in the labor force adds 3; full time is employed with usual hours of 35 or more. Other household income is the household’s total income less the parent’s own total personal income, both adjusted to 2024 dollars. A new mother has fertility code 1. School enrolment among three- and four-year-olds is the school item: 2 public, 3 private, 1 not enrolled. The child-care workforce is employed people with occupation code 4600 (childcare workers), split by industry: 814 private households, 6244 child day care services, otherwise elsewhere; preschool teachers in day care are occupation 2300 in industry 6244; the 2015 to 2018 files carry the same codes. Hourly earnings are total earnings times the Bureau’s within-year factor and the New York-metro CPI to 2024 dollars, divided by usual weekly hours times weeks worked, for people with all three positive; the 2015 to 2018 files’ banded weeks are the extract’s midpoints. Household income is the housing record’s income adjusted the same way; family income is the housing record’s family income (FINCP), the income of the householder and everyone related to them. Rent burden is gross rent 30% or more of income among renters with a computed ratio under 101%; crowding is persons over bedrooms greater than two, a studio counted as half; poverty is the income-to-poverty ratio under 100 where computed. Race and ethnicity are Hispanic of any race, otherwise the census’s single race.

Leavers and rates. As in the migration piece: every record in the national one-year person file with migration state 36 and a five-borough migration PUMA a year earlier, now living elsewhere in the United States, joined to the household it lives in now. The out-migration rate is leavers over stayers, within-city movers and leavers, computed replicate by replicate among people aged one and over; the age bands are age at the survey. Net domestic flow of an age band is arrivals from elsewhere in the United States minus leavers, within one year’s file. Destinations use the current state and, within the study area, the region of the current microdata area.

Cost of care (computed). The State’s weekly maximum rate for county group 4 effective 1 October 2024 (day care centre $500 under 1½ years, $450 at 1½ to 2, $439 at 3 to 5; family and group family day care $400 under 2, $350 at 2, $325 at 3 to 5), times 52 weeks, compared with each household’s 2024 family income among households whose youngest child of the householder is under 3 and whose family income is positive; the share within a threshold is a household-weighted share with a replicate margin, and the same shares on household income are kept as a sensitivity. The 7% threshold is the March 2024 federal co-payment cap, rescinded effective 13 July 2026, used as a conventional yardstick. The rate is a parameter: the same calculation at the Comptroller’s survey averages ($26,000 centre, $18,200 family) gives the same centre result by construction and a family-care result between the two rates here.

Administrative series. Under-fives are the five counties’ age group 0 to 4 from the Bureau’s county characteristics files, Vintage 2020 (July 2010 to July 2020) and Vintage 2025 (July 2020 to July 2025, plus the April 2020 base); changes are computed within a vintage only, never across the two. Births are transcribed from Table PC1 of the Summary of Vital Statistics 2023. School enrolment is read from the Department of Education’s demographic snapshot workbook, citywide with and without charter schools. Voucher, seat and coverage figures are transcribed from the State Comptroller’s report 19-2026 and the City Comptroller’s January 2025 spotlight; the 2-K figures from the Mayor’s press releases of 2 June and 4 August 2026; the federal rule from the Federal Register of 12 May 2026.

Estimators. For any statistic computed with the full weight, the same statistic is recomputed with each of the 80 replicate weights and the variance is the Bureau’s successive-difference estimator, four-eightieths of the summed squared deviations of the replicate estimates from the full-weight one; margins are 90%, or 1.645 standard errors. Shares and rates are computed replicate by replicate; medians are weighted medians without a margin. A published row is reproduced if the difference is within the root of the summed squared margins, the Bureau’s test for a difference between two estimates. Chart cells resting on fewer than 30 records, or rates on fewer than ten leaver records, are labelled too thin rather than drawn.

Does it reproduce? Every one of the fourteen rows lands inside the published margin in 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. The year-by-year comparison is the reproduction table.

The full 2024 results. Children: 1,658,275 under 18, 543,082 ± 7,866 under 6, 264,391 under 3; own children under 6, 512,908. Arrangement of own children under 6: both parents in the labor force 41.1%, two parents with one at home 20.9% (mother at home 17.4%, father 3.5%), neither 0.6%, lone parent in the labor force 29.2%, lone parent not 8.2%; all resident parents in the labor force 70.3% against 63.5% in 2015 and 66.4% in 2019; not living with a parent, 4.8% of household children under 6. By age: all parents in the labor force 66.9% under 1, 73.1% at 1, 72.4% at 2, 70.2% at 3, 71.4% at 4, 68.1% at 5, 71.4% at 6 to 12, 73.3% at 13 to 17. Households: 3,379,652, of which 340,510 with a child under 6 (10.1%), 481,633 with children 6 to 17 only, 2,557,509 with none; medians $103,073, $87,612 and $79,470; renting 69.3%, 64.2%, 67.7%; rent-burdened 43.6%, 48.5%, 44.3%; crowded 32.8%, 20.8%, 4.6%. Parents whose youngest child is under 6: mothers 73.5% in the labor force, 68.3% employed, 49.9% full time; fathers 89.9% employed; 74,968 mothers and 14,812 fathers out of the labor force. Mothers out of the labor force by other household income, 2024 (2015): 21.1% (26.2%) under $25,000, 36.9% (40.9%), 35.3% (42.5%), 21.9% (30.7%), 24.0% (28.7%), 21.7% (36.7%), 20.7% (43.0%) above $300,000. New mothers 89,795: 69.6% in the labor force, 64.5% employed, 50.2% full time. Preschool: at 3, 65.6% enrolled, 43.8% public, 21.8% private; at 4, 82.7%, 67.5%, 15.2%. Workforce: private-household childcare workers 11,461 ± 2,972 (median $17.3 an hour, $32,983 a year, 40 hours, 59.8% foreign-born, 99.0% women, 34.5% self-employed, 19.5% in poverty); day care 19,489 ± 2,919 ($14.1, $20,202, 35 hours, 36.6% in poverty); elsewhere 7,237; preschool teachers in day care 12,564 ± 2,799 ($23.8, $49,475); all workers’ median hourly earnings $29.7. Leaving: out-migration rate 4.29% at ages 1 to 5, 2.20% at 6 to 12, 2.21% at 13 to 17, 5.31% at 25 to 44, 1.91% at 45 and over; adults 25 to 44 living with children now 4.1%, without 5.8%; net domestic flow of one-to-five-year-olds −13,412 ± 4,189 (6,282 arrived from elsewhere in the US, 7,847 from abroad, 19,694 left); destinations of the 19,694: suburbs 50.0%, elsewhere in New Jersey or Connecticut 7.6%, the rest of the South 9.0%, the Midwest 7.7%, Florida 4.8%, Pennsylvania 4.7%, California 3.8%. Cost: 165,672 households with a child under 3, median family income $108,227 (household income $116,473); the infant centre rate within 7% of family income for 13.3%, 10% for 21.1%, 20% for 44.7%, 30% for 59.4% (on household income 14.0%, 22.0%, 47.0%, 61.4%).

Rerunning it. The analysis script computes every figure and number above, the charts and the dashboard in one run from a fixed seed; its docstring is the long-form method, and the leaver extraction from the national files is a separate script named there. The companion dataset is the census records themselves: every child under 18, every parent and every childcare worker in the 2015, 2019 and 2024 files, residents and leavers, with their survey weights and the derived variables, so a weighted count of the children’s records within a year reproduces the headline counts. The build manifest names the version of this page the run was made for and the checksum of the script and of every file linked here, so a downloaded script can be checked against the numbers on the page.