As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, Louisiana has 4 cities among the largest 250 in the nation.
A childcare worker in Baton Rouge earns 49 cents on every dollar a single adult needs to cover basic expenses in East Baton Rouge Parish — the second-lowest worker-wage-to-living-wage ratio of any city in the 2026 score, behind only Jackson, Mississippi. That is the math behind Louisiana's 47/100 Strained ranking, 38th of 50 states. Headline affordability looks reassuring: $9,760 a year for full-time infant center care, well under the $17,163 national average. The number is low because the workforce is paid almost nothing to deliver it, and because 41 percent of households with children — the third-highest single-parent share in the country — have only one income to absorb whatever the market charges. The dimension scores follow.
Key highlights & actionable takeaways
- Strained (47/100), 38th nationally; the workforce dimension scores 5.9, among the five lowest in the country.
- Median early-educator pay is $10.63 an hour — 52.2 percent of the living wage statewide, and just 49 percent in Baton Rouge, second-lowest of any city in the index behind Jackson, MS.
- Single-parent households make up 41.2 percent of families with children — the third-highest share nationally, compounding every other strain in the system.
Affordability — 80/100
Louisiana posts a deceptively strong affordability score because its $9,760 forward-projected 2025 average for full-time infant center care is one of the lowest in the country in absolute dollars — about 57 percent of the $17,163 national figure. Toddler care runs $9,566, preschool $9,034, and family child care infant rates land at $7,492, the cheapest FCC infant figure in this batch.
Set against the state's $60,023 median household income, that infant figure consumes 16.3 percent of HHI — well below the 21.9 percent national share but more than double the federal 7-percent affordability threshold. A year of infant center care equals 0.78 months of median rent, putting Louisiana in the same broad band as Arkansas and Texas. As elsewhere in the South, the absolute prices are low because the underlying provider wages are also low — affordability for families and workforce health are not independent dimensions but two sides of the same ledger entry.
The county-level distribution in Louisiana is bimodal: New Orleans (Orleans Parish) and Baton Rouge (East Baton Rouge Parish) push prices to the high end of the in-state range while Lafayette Parish sits noticeably lower. That distribution shows up clearly in the city-level scores, where Lafayette earns 90.7 on affordability and Baton Rouge earns just 29.1.
Supply — 47/100
Louisiana counts roughly 229,340 children under 5 with potential care need against 139,760 licensed slots — a 38.8 percent statewide gap, one of the larger raw deficits in the country. The broader denominator of all children under 5 in households with working parents (360,092) deepens the picture: even on the conservative BPC count, Louisiana is missing roughly two licensed slots for every five it would need to cover demand.
The state operates 1,241 licensed establishments, or 4.29 per 1,000 kids under 5 — slightly above the 4.21 national rate and a number that flatters the supply picture by counting establishment density rather than capacity. The 47.1 supply score reflects what families actually experience: long waitlists in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge metros, thin rural coverage across the Mississippi Delta and Acadiana, and a steady drift of programs out of business since the post-stabilization era began in late 2023.
Workforce — 6/100
Louisiana's workforce dimension is the lowest score in any single dimension across all four states in this batch and one of the five lowest in the country. The state's median early-educator wage of $10.63 an hour translates to $22,100 annually for full-time work, against an EPI single-adult living wage of $20.37 — meaning the typical Louisiana childcare worker earns 52.2 percent of what a single adult needs to cover a basic budget in their own community.
This is not a scoring artifact. Lafayette's worker-wage-to-living-wage ratio is 53.8 percent. Shreveport's is 52.6 percent. Baton Rouge's is 49 percent — among the lowest readings of any city in the 2026 score, second only to Jackson, MS at 48 percent. The state employs 9,150 workers in the SOC 39-9011 occupation, a figure that has been trending down as turnover and program closures compound. The dimension score is what happens when a state runs the cheapest center-care market in the South on the backs of a workforce that cannot afford to live in the communities it serves. The implications for retention, ratios, quality, and child outcomes are direct, and providers in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge metros report turnover above 40 percent annually.
Family strain — 28.4/100
Mothers of children under 6 in Louisiana participate in the labor force at 69 percent — slightly above the 68.21 percent national rate, and the highest figure in this four-state batch. In a higher-income state, that participation level would read as a sign of a healthy childcare market. In Louisiana it reads as economic necessity: 41.19 percent of households with children are single-parent, the third-highest figure in the country, and a state median household income $18,500 below the national figure leaves little room for a one-earner family by choice.
The 28.4 family-strain score reflects the compound burden. Sixty-nine percent of children under 6 live in households with all parents working. Single parents — overwhelmingly mothers — make up four in ten of those households. A workforce earning half a living wage cannot scale to meet that demand. The math does not add up at the household level, and the dimension score makes that visible.
Policy support — 37.9/100
Louisiana's LA 4 pre-K program enrolls 34 percent of 4-year-olds and just 1 percent of 3-year-olds, with per-child spending of $5,676 — a respectable per-child investment that reaches a narrow share of the eligible population. The state meets 7.8 of 10 NIEER quality benchmarks, putting LA 4 among the higher-quality state pre-K programs even as enrollment trails. CCDF subsidy reaches 13 percent of eligible children, serving about 18,300 kids per month — below the 16-17 percent rates in neighboring states. Head Start enrolls another 18,898, of whom 3,754 are in Early Head Start.
Louisiana has no state paid family or medical leave program. The state's Early Childhood Care and Education Fund, established in 2017 and incrementally funded through tobacco taxes and gaming revenues, has expanded subsidized seat capacity for working families, but the policy footprint as a whole remains narrow against the scale of need.
City spotlight
Top performer. Lafayette (49/100, Strained, ranked #1 in Louisiana, 132nd nationally) leads the state's measured cities almost entirely on the strength of cheap infant care — 90.7 affordability, with infant center fees consuming just 13.9 percent of local household income. Lafayette is, however, also a Strained-tier city with a 4.8 workforce score; its top-of-state finish reflects the relative cost advantage in Acadiana, not a structurally healthy market.
Bottom performer. Baton Rouge (30/100, Crisis tier, ranked 243rd of 250 cities nationally and last among Louisiana's measured cities) posts the lowest workforce score in the index at 0.8, the lowest worker-wage-to-living-wage ratio in the entire score at 49 percent, and an affordability score of 29.1 driven by infant care that costs 25.4 percent of East Baton Rouge Parish median household income. Baton Rouge is the clearest example in the country of what happens when childcare prices climb above the local cost-of-living curve while wages stay flat.
New Orleans (44/100, Strained, #2 in state) and Shreveport (39/100, Strained, #3) sit in between, both anchored by single-digit workforce scores.
In-home care in Louisiana
The in-home care market in Louisiana is small, regionally concentrated, and structurally fragile. Beverly Research's intake data shows full-time live-out nanny rates in New Orleans and Baton Rouge running $22-30 an hour, with the Garden District, Uptown New Orleans, and the Bocage corridor in Baton Rouge anchoring most demand. Annualized full-time hires run $45,000-$60,000, well above center care for families with one or two children, which limits the addressable market to professional households at the upper end of state income distribution.
Nanny shares between two families have grown in New Orleans since 2024, partially as a response to closures of small in-home centers in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. Au pair placements exist in metro New Orleans and Baton Rouge but are not at the scale seen in larger Southern markets. Critically, the state's badly underpaid center workforce has become a recruitment pool for private nanny placements — particularly in New Orleans — meaning that families who can afford in-home care are quietly siphoning experienced caregivers out of the licensed system, accelerating the workforce-supply doom loop the dimension scores describe.
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). State scores roll up county-level price and supply data to a population-weighted average. 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 (2018 base, 2023 DOL-projected, 2025 forward-projected); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS (May 2024) and QCEW NAICS 624410 (2024); Bipartisan Policy Center 2026 state childcare data PDFs; Buffett Early Childhood Institute / Child Care Aware childcaregap.org (Sept 2025); NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook 2024; HHS ACF CCDF FY2023; National Partnership for Women & Families (March 2026); EPI Family Budget Calculator (2024).