Child Care Center Operating Budget Basics: Defining Expenses and Revenues to Estimate the Cost of Child Care (March 2006)

Peg Oliveira, PhD

While the Connecticut early care and education industry is a large and important one, many child care centers struggle to make ends meet and there is limited data available on the costs of running a child care center business. CT Voices for Children

• Has produced a user-friendly operating budget spreadsheet for child care centers
• Plans to use this model budget to collect information from Connecticut child care centers, establishing a longitudinal data set that reflects the annual budgets of child care centers; and
• Will use the collected data in a validity check against the Tool for Comparing Early Care and Education Program Costs, a "calculator" developed to estimate the operating costs associated with running a child care center.

Downloads

[1] Issue Brief (175.92K)
[2] Operating Budget Spreadsheet (72K)