New York City Mayor’s Office of Child Care
December 2025 - May 2026
On March 31, 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the launch of the New York City Parent Survey, a first-of-its-kind representative survey of NYC parents with young children intended to inform the rollout of universal child care. On October 8th, results were shared. This project was a collaboration between the New Practice Lab and the Robin Hood Foundation.
Why This Matters For Families
Outside of housing, child care remains one of the largest household expenses and drivers of New York City’s affordability crisis. Population and school enrollment data indicate that the city is losing families with young children, as they move out of the boroughs in search of lower cost of living. While New York has increased income eligibility for subsidized care, many families still struggling with out-of-pocket child care costs remain ineligible, and demand for subsidies outstrips available resources – with the voucher waitlist climbing to over 10,000 children. A 2021 child care affordability study found that only one in four income-eligible families in NYC received government assistance for child care. Having universally accessible, affordable, and quality child care has the potential to reduce the economic pressure on families, saving families utilizing care today more than a collective $1 billion annually.
The Implementation Challenge
Mayor Zohran Mamdani entered office at the start of 2026 having campaigned on a policy of providing universal child care for all New York City children under five years old. The Mamdani Administration announced in January that the first steps toward delivering on the policy would be to expand the number of fully-subsidized seats for three-year-olds through the City’s existing 3-K program and also stand up new fully-subsidized seats for two-year-olds.
The new program, called 2-K, would be available to 2,000 children beginning in September 2026 and expand to an additional 10,000 children the following school year. The administration intends to enroll more children over time, aiming to meet the demand for child care among the nearly 100,000 two-year-olds in the city, and eventually expand to even younger children.
Expanding access to high-quality, affordable care for all those families who want it will require sizable new public investments over time. But it will also require the City to engage in careful planning to address challenges related to both supply and demand. Where, in the most populous city in the country, spanning over 30 school districts and hundreds of thousands of young children, should the initial 2-K seats be placed? How many New York City parents with two-year-olds actually want child care, and where and when do they want it? What about parents with children under the age of two?
Not being able to answer these fundamental questions about the demand for child care poses risks to successful implementation, hampering efforts to budget for the outyears, appropriately target family outreach and communication strategies, and design a program that meets the diverse needs of New York City families.
As the Mamdani Administration has made universal access to child care a cornerstone of its policy agenda, understanding exactly what care parents want —and when they want it — is critical, as is ensuring that families have a voice in shaping this ambitious effort.
Our Approach
To ensure the City’s universal child care program is informed by what families really want, the New Practice Lab designed and launched a largest-of-its-kind representative survey of New Yorkers with young children. Building off of the Lab’s National Parent Survey, and funded by the Robin Hood Foundation, the roughly 50-question survey, developed in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office for Child Care and Early Childhood Education (MOCCECE), was open from March 31, 2026 - through April 20, 2026 and covered a range of topics:
The gap between current and ideal child care arrangements in terms of schedules (hours/days available) and type (e.g., relative, home-based, center-based, school)
Preferences for child care arrangements from birth to age three, to understand if and how preferences might change over early childhood
School district-level estimates of demand for formal care
Demographic information to understand distribution of needs at a school district level
How parents learned about and decided on their current child care arrangement
What qualities are most important in their child’s early care and education environments
Familiarity with existing NYS and NYC programs including child care subsidies, 3K, early intervention, and the Empire State Child Credit (New York’s CTC)
Utilization of paid parental leave as well as desired duration of parental leave
Average household child care expenses
The New Practice Lab worked with NORC at the University of Chicago, who led the sampling, recruitment of a representative group of New York City parents, data collection, and supported analysis.
In total, 4,306 parents and caregivers from every NYC neighborhood completed the survey, providing a representative view of all NYC Parents with children under six. For more on our methods and the survey instrument, see the report linked below.
What We Learned
The survey findings offer MOCCECE and City agencies leading the implementation of universal child care critical information about what families are looking for in child care. These data are being used in the immediate term as one input to inform where new 2-K seats will be added and how best to engage and communicate with families about the benefits on offer. In the longer term, the data provide a much sounder foundation on which to project future need (including funding) and enrollment than existing Census and population data could.
Below are highlights from the survey results; however, a more comprehensive summary of the findings is available in our report here.
Parents use many types of child care - and care is a 24/7 issue. Forty percent of parents are using care during “nontraditional” hours - weekday evenings and nights, or on weekends.
Nearly half of NYC parents with young children don’t have the type of care they want. Overall, 39 percent of parents say they have less child care than they need.
The demand for formal child care - in a licensed setting such as a child care center, home-based program, or school - varies widely by age and NYC neighborhood. Still, a combined 92% of parents want formal child care at some point before their child turns four, or would be open to it if it was free.
Awareness of existing public programs, including 3-K, Pre-K, and child care vouchers, differs across income, race/ethnicity, and language.
Most NYC parents want longer parental leave than they had: five to six months on average compared to the three or fewer most took.
NYC parents paying for child care are spending nearly $20,000 a year on average - up to $29,000 among parents whose youngest child is under one.
Parents say addressing cost and flexibility in child care options would make the biggest difference to their families.
The New Practice Lab has briefed dozens of City workers across agencies involved in child care and is available for presentations to stakeholders. As New York City deploys new child care investments, we believe the survey findings point toward several takeaways for government leaders to consider:
Make parental leave part of the universal child care strategy.
Integrate informal settings into a universal system to meet the needs of more parents at each stage of early childhood.
Build more flexibility into publicly-funded program models to better match families’ needs.
Invest in multilingual, multicultural outreach to build greater awareness and trust in publicly funded care.
Next Steps
The full report was released alongside a public use data file of responses, with the hope that government and nongovernmental stakeholders alike can build on and learn from this effort.
