Renee Hankins and her fiance pay more to keep their sons in day care than they pay on their home.
It costs the Erwin couple $800 a month to send 4-year-old Shay and 13-month-old Gage to day care.
“Our day care is like our mortgage and our car payment,” Hankins said.
Across the country, the rising cost of child care is straining working families and leaving taxpayers to shoulder millions of dollars for subsidies.
Yet the problem appears worse than average in North Carolina, which ranks among the most expensive states for young families who need child care. A typical two-parent family with a 4-year-old spends nearly 11 percent of its income on preschool day care, according to a recent study. For a single parent, it’s about 36 percent of income.
On average, what North Carolinians pay for day care is higher than rent, mortgage payments and college tuition, the study found.
The factors that help ensure quality care for children are partly to blame for driving up costs, experts say. More stringent educational requirements for day-care workers drive up expenses.
“We all want to make sure children have the best care because those years are the most important in their lives,” said Alice Thomas of Harnett County Child Care Resource and Referral.
In some cases, the high cost can make it impossible for a parent to work, especially for single-parent families.
The study that ranked North Carolina as expensive for parents was done by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, which surveyed state child-care referral networks. It found that North Carolina is the eighth least-affordable state for preschool care.
The average price for full-time care of a 4-year-old in North Carolina is $6,756 a year.
Cumberland County has 11,800 children enrolled in 211 day-care centers and 235 regulated day-care homes, according to the Cumberland County Partnership for Children, a Smart Start-funded program.
Parents of infants pay an average of $562 each month at day-care centers. Parents of 4-year-olds pay an average of $468. Some centers charge more than $700 for infant care.
Help is available, but there isn’t enough money to assist all eligible families.
In August, the Cumberland County Department of Social Services spent $1.7 million subsidizing day care — an average of $334 per child for 5,100 children.
That means about 43 percent of all county children in day care receive subsidies.
Continued spending at that pace would go beyond the program’s $18.4 million budget for the year — a mix of state and Smart Start funds.
And more than 1,000 children are on a waiting list.
“The demand is much larger than the state can fund,” said Richard Everett, assistant director for economic independence at the county Department of Social Services.
Qualifying parents pay up to 10 percent of the day-care costs themselves, with the county paying the rest.
“In many cases, it makes a difference whether the parents work or not,” he said.
Some parents would be worse off getting a job because they’d have to pay so much child care, said Glenn McQueen, who manages the Fayetteville office of the N.C. Employment Security Commission.
“That does deter a lot of folks from staying in the labor market,” McQueen said. “It’s very frustrating. But there’s nothing we can do about it until the costs decrease, the wages increase or the government decides they’re going to subsidize child care at more than 50 percent.”