As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, Honolulu ranks the 55th largest city in the nation.
A Honolulu family with two children in licensed care — one infant, one preschooler — pays more in tuition than the national median household earns before taxes. Center-based infant care alone runs $25,320 a year, the third-highest reading in this index after San Francisco and a handful of Bay Area neighbors, and consumes 29.6% of the city's $85,428 median household income. Oahu's geography compounds the math: 24 licensed slots exist for every 100 working-parent kids under five — formally a childcare desert — and the licensed sector competes for caregivers against a hospitality economy with no second island to absorb the spillover. Honolulu, the only Hawaii city in this index, ranks 246th of 250.
Key highlights & actionable takeaways
- 246th nationally, score 27 (Crisis) — the only Hawaii city in this index, in the bottom ten measured.
- Infant care costs $25,320 a year — 29.6% of household income; Honolulu County licenses 24 slots per 100 working-parent kids under five.
- A geography problem: an isolated island economy where high prices, weak supply, and thin policy collide with a workforce that participates anyway.
Actionable takeaways
- The two-kids-in-care number is the headline. A Honolulu family with one infant and one preschooler in licensed centers pays more than $41,800 a year — north of what the national median household earns before taxes. Worth running against local salary medians in healthcare, hospitality, and the visitor economy.
- CCDF reach of 8.3% is the lowest in the entire index. Hawaii also has zero weeks of state paid family leave. That combination — country-weakest subsidy targeting plus no leave — is a structural state-policy story, not an Oahu-specific one.
- Multigenerational ohana is doing invisible work. With 24 licensed slots per 100 working-parent kids and a 71% mothers' LFP, the gap is filled by grandparents, aunties, and extended family that no public dataset counts. That invisibility shapes what reform proposals would actually move.
Affordability — 13/100
For a Honolulu family with one child in a licensed infant center, the bill comes to $25,320 a year — about $2,110 a month. That is the third-highest infant-care cost in this city index, behind only San Francisco and a handful of Bay Area neighbors. It eats 29.6% of the city's median household income of $85,428, well above the 21.9% national burden and only modestly below New York City's reading. Family child care is meaningfully cheaper at $13,505 a year, and it carries a larger share of the local market than in most US cities — partly because Hawaii's regulatory landscape historically allowed more home-based providers, partly because Honolulu real estate makes large center buildings hard to pencil out.
The local infant-childcare-to-rent ratio is 1.18; care is 18% more expensive per month than the median Honolulu apartment, and the apartment runs $1,783. A typical Honolulu family with two kids in licensed care, one in infant and one in preschool, faces an annual childcare bill north of $41,800 — more than the national median household earns in a year before taxes.
Supply — 32/100
Honolulu County offers roughly 24 licensed slots for every 100 kids under five with working parents — a ratio that meets the strict definition of a childcare desert (more than three kids per slot). The 242 licensed establishments serving this population work out to about four per 1,000 kids under five, slightly below the national density. Hawaii's statewide picture is somewhat better than Honolulu County's alone — outer-island family child care fills more of the gap — but the state's overall supply gap of 60.7% remains among the worst readings in the nation. Geography plays in here: the supply problem is less about regulation and more about the structural cost of building licensed capacity on Oahu real estate.
Workforce — 19/100
Childcare workers in Honolulu earn a median $17.48 an hour — $36,370 a year, similar to the New York City wage. The local single-adult living wage on Oahu is $30.83 an hour, putting wages at 57% of what one adult needs to live in the city without children. Hawaii's combination of high cost-of-living and modest wages drives one of the country's most acute caregiving workforce shortages: licensed center directors on Oahu describe years-long search timelines for credentialed lead teachers, and a steady leak to school-system jobs and to mainland relocation.
Family strain — 68.9/100
Seventy-one percent of Honolulu mothers with kids under six are in the labor force — well above the 68% national rate, in a city where the median household needs roughly $85,000 just to clear baseline cost-of-living. Single parents head 29% of households with kids, slightly below the national share. Read together, the picture is one of necessity rather than opportunity: high mothers' labor force participation in a high-cost market with thin childcare supply almost always signals that staying out of the workforce is not an economically viable option for most families. Hawaii's multigenerational household share — among the highest in the country — fills part of the gap that licensed care does not.
Policy support — 13.1/100
Hawaii inherits down to Honolulu, and the inheritance is among the country's weakest. The state enrolls 5% of four-year-olds in publicly funded pre-K and 2% of three-year-olds — among the lowest readings in the nation outside states with no pre-K program at all. Per-child pre-K spending of $7,398 looks reasonable, but the program reaches almost no one in absolute terms (roughly 3,500 children served monthly through CCDF, the smallest absolute reach of any state in this index). There is no state-mandated paid family leave. CCDF subsidy reach covers 8.3% of eligible kids — the lowest in this index. To Hawaii's credit, the state's pre-K program does meet 10 of NIEER's quality benchmarks, the highest of any state in this batch. The program is small, but what exists is well-built.
In-home care in Honolulu
Honolulu's nanny market is shaped by the island geography: a smaller absolute pool of professional caregivers than mainland metros of similar population, and a labor market shared with hospitality and the visitor economy. Full-time live-out nanny rates for one child have settled in the $22-to-$28-per-hour range in Manoa, Kahala, and Hawaii Kai, with experienced career nannies in Diamond Head and the Kaimuki ridge neighborhoods commanding $30 and up. Multigenerational caregiving — grandparents, aunties, extended ohana — fills a meaningful share of weekday childcare, particularly for households with deep local roots. Au pair hosting is uncommon on the island, partly due to housing footprint, partly due to the small pool of host-family experience. Military families on the windward side and around Pearl Harbor draw on a parallel system through CDC programs and Department of Defense subsidies that does not show up in civilian supply counts.
Methodology: The the score is a 0-100 composite score across five dimensions: Affordability (30 pts), Supply (25 pts), Workforce Health (15 pts), Family Strain (15 pts), and Policy Support (15 pts). City-level prices and supply use the city's primary containing county; Honolulu is a Census-designated place inside the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, which is coterminous with Honolulu County. Policy Support is measured at the state level. Full methodology and data sources: beverly.io/research/methodology.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2019-2023 5-year estimates; U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau National Database of Childcare Prices; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS (May 2024) and QCEW; Buffett Early Childhood Institute / Bipartisan Policy Center / Child Care Aware childcaregap.org (Sept 2025); NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook 2024; HHS ACF CCDF FY2023; National Partnership for Women & Families (March 2026).