The Thirty Eight Billion Dollars Employers Do Not Know They Are Spending

Thirty eight billion dollars a year. That is what American employers lose because their people cannot reliably find child care, and almost none of them have it written down anywhere.

It is not a line in a budget. It does not appear in a variance report. It shows up as somebody leaving at two in the afternoon, as a shift covered late, as a good manager quietly turning down a promotion that involves travel, and as a resignation that gets logged under personal reasons.

The number comes from ReadyNation’s 2026 study, and I want to walk through it properly, because the way this gets reported almost always buries the part that would actually move a room full of business owners.

The whole bill, and who is holding which piece

The headline figure is $172 billion a year, for families with children under five. Then it splits three ways.

Families carry $134 billion of it, in earnings they never make and in the cost of searching for work that fits around a care schedule rather than around what they are good at.

Employers carry $38 billion, in reduced productivity, absence and turnover.

And taxpayers carry $37 billion, in federal and state revenue that never arrives because the earnings that would have generated it never happened.

That third number is the one nobody quotes and it is worth sitting with. Every dollar a parent does not earn is a dollar that is not taxed. So the public cost of not solving this is already being paid, every year, quietly, in the form of revenue that does not exist. There is no version of this where the money is saved. There is only a version where it is spent visibly, on care, and a version where it is spent invisibly, on the absence of care. We have chosen the second one by default rather than on purpose, which is the worst way to choose anything.

The trend is the argument, not the total

One year’s figure is an anecdote with a decimal point. The series is the argument.

The same researchers measured this in 2018 and found $57 billion. They measured it again in 2022 and found $122 billion. Now, in 2026, $172 billion.

I have to flag one thing before anybody puts that on a slide. The 2018 and 2022 studies covered families with children under three. The 2026 study widened the frame to children under five. So the three figures are not a like for like series and I have said so on the graphic as well, because a chart that quietly changes its own definition is how people stop trusting charts.

The growth is still real. Between 2018 and 2022, on the identical under three basis, the cost more than doubled. Whatever the exact slope, this line goes one way.

What the parents actually said

ReadyNation polled 801 working parents, and the results read like an operations problem rather than a social one.

More than 60 percent said child care difficulties caused them to leave work early, arrive late, miss a full day, or sit at a desk distracted. About half had missed part of a shift. Ninety percent said availability was a challenge in some way, roughly half said affordability was a significant struggle, and 40 percent said they could not find high quality care.

Read that as an employer rather than as a parent. Nine in ten of your working parents are managing an availability problem that has nothing to do with you and lands entirely on your schedule. You are already paying for it. You are simply paying for it in a currency you do not track.

Why the framing keeps losing

Here is my honest read on why nothing much moves.

Child care gets filed under family policy, and family policy competes for attention against every other social good, in a category most business leaders consider somebody else’s department. That filing decision, made decades ago and never revisited, is doing more damage than any individual budget vote.

Move the same facts into the language business already uses and watch what happens. This is not a benefit. It is a workforce availability constraint with a measured annual cost. It is deferred maintenance on the labour supply. It is a capital plan question, not a compassion question.

None of that is spin. It is a more accurate description of what the $38 billion is. A cost you incur without recording is still a cost, and the fact that it arrives as scheduling friction rather than as an invoice does not make it smaller.

We understand this instinctively about roads. Nobody argues that a closed bridge is a personal problem for the people who used to drive over it. We count the detour, we price the delay and we call it economic impact. Child care is doing exactly what a closed bridge does to a regional economy, and we are the only ones who insist it belongs in a parenting column.

What this looks like in Pennsylvania

The national number is useful for winning an argument in the abstract. The local number is what wins a meeting.

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children has run the state level version of this analysis, which matters here because Philadelphia’s economy is built on exactly the sectors this hits hardest: hospitals, universities, hospitality and retail, all of them running shifts, all of them staffed disproportionately by parents who cannot simply work later when something falls through.

Every one of those employers is carrying a piece of the $38 billion right now, and most of them could tell you their food cost to a tenth of a percent while having no idea at all what this line is costing them. I have run enough shifts to know how it shows up: not as a crisis, but as a Tuesday where two people cannot come in and the rest of the week bends around it.

The ask, and it is a small one

I am not going to end this with a policy platform. I want one thing.

Put the employer number on a business agenda. A chamber meeting, a board meeting, an anchor institution’s workforce committee. Not as a social issue with a slide of stock photography. As a cost line, with the figure on it, next to the other cost lines.

Then ask the only question that follows: what would it take to move it, and what is it worth to us to move it. Some of the answers are things a single employer can do. Most of them are things a group of employers can do together, which is usually where this work actually lives, because no one company can fix a regional care supply on its own and every one of them benefits when somebody does.

You will be amazed how differently a room behaves when the same set of facts arrives in the correct file.