Allen Harris, Information Visualization 658 Spring 2026
NYC is experiencing a child care affordability crisis. Parents across all five boroughs face long waitlists, unaffordable rates, and shrinking options. Policymakers are competing to offer visions for how best to provide parents with the child care programs they need. But this crisis did not appear suddenly. It is a product of a decade long structural strain on the city’s child care system, one that COVID accelerated before a tentative recovery began to take hold. Using data from New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), this report examines licensed and registered child care providers in NYC from 2015 to 2025. The data capture both the capacity of programs in units of number of children and modality of programs (such as afterschool programs, or through group family day care.)
Figure 1.
2025 marks the first year NYC has returned to something approaching pre-COVID child care capacity, but is has not yet recovered to 2015 levels. As shown in figure 1, total program capacity peaked at just over 20,000 children in 2015, then declined steadily through the pre-pandemic years before collapsing to a low of approximately 17,161 children in 2021. By 2025, capacity has climbed back to 18,883. This is a meaningful recovery but still roughly 5% below the 2015 peak.
Figure 2.
Figure 2 expresses the same decline and tentative recovery in percentage terms, as the graph shows year over year change in total capacity. From 2016 through 2021, capacity contracted every year, with the steepest single-year drop occurring in 2020 at nearly -4%, likely the direct result of COVID closures, licensing freezes, and provider shutdowns. The recovery beginning in 2022 has beed consistently positive, reaching a +4.4% increase in 2025. The color gradient used in both charts reinforces the narrative arc: deep red marks the years of loss, transitioning through neutral to cool blue as capacity grows. This design choice was intentional to communicate contraction and growth.
Figure 3.
Not all modalities have recovered equally or are responsible for meeting the need. Figure 3 shows the capacity by program type and reveals that Group Family Day Care (GFDC) in green is almost entirely responsible for the post-2021 rebound. GFDC capacity, which had dipped to around 7,400 in 2021, surged to over 9,000 by 2025. This growth likely reflects a combination of factors that could be shown through further analysis: lower overhead costs relative to formal day care centers, greater flexibility in licensing requirements (perhaps leading to a transition from smaller Family Day Care (FDC) providers, and targeted policy support from home-based group care models as a scalable solution to the affordability crisis.
In contrast, FCD, which are smaller home-based programs typically serving less than 6 children, has declined steadily from around 4,700 in 2015 to just over 2,100 in 2025. Both Day Care Centers and School-age Child Care have remained relatively stable and have seen more modest growth in recent years.
Reflection and Next Steps
Several limitations and open questions remain. First, capacity is distinct from affordability or accessibility. This is a portion of the analysis which clarifies the supply of these services but is missing the demand in NYC. In addition, a program may be licensed to serve 40 children but only serve 8 due to staffing shortages or gaps in subsidies. Integrating subsidy use from the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) would strengthen this analysis. Second, the geographic dimension is important but absent here. Some areas in NYC lack access to affordable childcare or have too many children for available seats. A neighborhood-level map would more precisely identify where capacity gaps are most acute.
The designs are nearly complete. In reflection, I would consider moving the legends to be placed on the chart in blank space. Currently there are awkward spaces where are not being used. Figure 3 could even remove the legend entirely because direct labelling was used. The title work is effective for telling the story and showing the data. Figure 2 however could be improved with the addition of some sort of metric for child care demand. While the title discusses a gap, the data itself only speaks to half of the affordability story by focusing on capacity.
Data and Methodology
The OCFS dataset captures all licensed and registered child care programs in New York State, updated on a rolling basis. For this analysis, records were filtered to NYC providers and aggregated by year and program modality. The original dataset wasn’t designed with single year values for program count for each cell, so using OpenRefine I restructured the data for machine readability. Modalities include Day Care Centers (DCC), Family Day Care (FDC), Group Family Day Care (GFDC), and School-age Child Care (SACC.) Capacity figures reflect the maximum number of children a program is licensed to serve at a given time, not actual enrollment. An important caveat is this data reflects the supply side of child care only, as demand side factors such as the number of facilities seeking care, income eligibility, or use of subsidies are not captured here.