Democratic state lawmakers and child care advocates sounded a warning Thursday about a “child care crisis” due to the growing number of day care centers and other facilities closing.

Speakers at the State of Child Care in NC roundtable said 5% of North Carolina’s child care programs have closed since 2019, with the rate of closures rising in recent months. Unless the state acts to increase funding, speakers warned that the number of affordable child care options will continue to decline for families across the state.

“The rubber band has already snapped,” DeeDee Fields, a former child care provider, said at the forum held at Kate’s Korner Learning Center, a licensed child care center in downtown Durham. “There’s no more elasticity, not that there was. We just function. We’re just surviving.”

Child care centers are closing

Child care advocates have been sounding the alarm about lack of options for decades. But concerns have escalated since the loss of COVID federal stabilization grants in January 2025 that helped keep centers afloat during the pandemic.

Nearly all of the state’s child care facilities received stabilization grants that allowed them to pay employees, cover rent and mortgage costs, and subsidize child care costs for some families.

Organizers of Thursday’s roundtable referenced figures recently reported by EdNC, including:

•North Carolina has had a net loss of 367 licensed child care programs since the start of the pandemic. More than 12% of those losses occurred during the last quarter of 2025.

•The net loss of 45 programs in the final three months of 2025 represents the largest single-quarter drop since EdNC began tracking changes.

•Since February 2020, the number of licensed family child care homes has dropped by 24%.

Forum organizers warned that urban and suburban counties have experienced some of the steepest declines since the pandemic began. Durham County, for example, has seen child care programs drop around 14% since 2020.

“Parents are stretching paychecks past their breaking points every single day,” said Devonya Govan-Hunt, executive director of Black Child Development Carolinas. “Providers are holding doors open with sheer will and impossibly thin margins.”

Child care costs more than college tuition

The closures are occurring at a time when forum organizers said 18,000 children in North Carolina are on waitlists for child care subsidies and 35% of U.S. parents reported leaving the workforce due to child care issues.

“We certainly should not accept that in a place like North Carolina — where we have one of the most educated populations in the country — that the mother has to choose between her future and child care and the costs that are associated with it,” said state Rep. Zack Hawkins, a Durham Democrat.

Behind those statistics are parents doing all they can to patch together child care so they can work, according to Govan-Hunt..

“It’s an auntie that sits on the front porch and knows everybody in the community that’s being trusted to watch them until I get off from work so I can put food on the table, so I don’t have to decide whether or not I’m going to pay the light bill or pay the grocery bill this month,” Govan-Hunt said.

Infant care for one child costs approximately $11,720 in North Carolina and $19,464 for two children. That’s more than the in-state tuition for schools in the UNC System, even with the increases that were approved on Thursday.

“Families cannot afford child care when child care is more than your mortgage or more than your rent, or it’s the same cost as college at a public university,” said Kate Irish, executive director of the Durham Partnership for Children. “I don’t know many people with 2-year-olds that are ready to pay for college, right?”

Low pay for child care workers

The loss of the stabilization funding means declining salaries for child care workers. It’s back down to an average salary of $14 per hour for early child care workers in North Carolina.

The people who take care of other people’s children would have to spend nearly 40% of their earnings to put their own children in child care.

Angela Shipp, a child care educator in Forsyth County, called $14 an hour a “true insult” to her and her colleagues. As much as she loves her job, Shipp said she can’t recommend it to people until compensation is increased.

“Do not do it, because for what you put in, you’re not going to receive anything from it,” Shipp said.

Child care centers can’t attract and retain teachers because their employees can make more money doing other jobs such as driving for Amazon or Uber, according to Irish.

“They are leaving child care because it doesn’t make sense for their family,” Irish said. “They can’t afford it.”

Will NC increase child care funding?

North Carolina was the only state that didn’t adopt a comprehensive budget in 2025. Democratic lawmakers blamed the lack of increases in child care funding on Republicans who control both General Assembly chambers but couldn’t agree on a budget.

“It is 100% true that child care is a bipartisan issue, and it is also true that there’s only one party holding up the state budget in this moment,” said state Sen. Sophia Chitlik, a Durham Democrat.

Democratic lawmakers at the forum said they hope to persuade the General Assembly to increase child care funding when the legislative short session starts in April.

”We’ve got to do a better job,” said state Sen. Natalie Murdock, a Durham Democrat. “We’ve got to get something from this short session that makes this crisis better.”

But the legislators said they may have to rely on public-private partnerships and local governments to increase child care availability in the meantime.

“Everything cannot be legislated, and if it is, it takes a damn long time,” Hawkins said. “And so we have to be able to pull on our community resources to help make a difference.”

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