As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, Mississippi has one city among the largest 250 in the nation.
Center infant care in Mississippi costs $6,024 a year — less than a single month of daycare in Manhattan. The price is the lowest in America by a wide margin, and the lead teacher running that infant room earns $10.46 an hour, also the lowest in America by a wide margin. The two numbers describe the same equation. Mississippi's childcare system has solved the affordability problem that consumes coastal household budgets, and it has solved it by paying its workforce a wage that does not cover half of what a single adult needs to live in the state. Hattiesburg families spend $2,000 more per year on daycare than New York City families spend in one month of it; their teachers, meanwhile, increasingly leave for jobs at Walmart and Dollar General. The Deep South paradox is whose back the math sits on.
Key highlights & actionable takeaways
- Moderate (58/100), 14th nationally and the highest score in the Deep South; perfect 100 on Affordability — the only state to hit it.
- Center infant care: $6,024 a year — the lowest absolute price in America, roughly a third of the $17,163 national median.
- Workers earn $10.46/hr covering 50.6% of a living wage; worst workforce score in the country and the structural cost of cheap care.
Affordability — 100/100
Mississippi posts a perfect 100 on Affordability, the only state in our cohort to do so. Center infant care averages $6,024 a year (NDCP, forward-projected to 2025) — 11.0% of the state's $54,915 median household income, half the national 21.9% burden. National median price: $17,163. Mississippi's price is roughly a third of that.
The cost picture is uniformly low across age and setting. Toddler and preschool care run $5,703 a year in centers. Family child care comes in lower still at $5,246 for infants. The state's median rent of $923 a month means childcare and shelter are roughly comparable on a monthly basis — $502 in childcare against $923 in rent — and the childcare-to-rent ratio of 0.54 is the lowest in the country. A Jackson family with one infant in center care spends less than $2,000 more annually on childcare than a New York City family pays in a single month.
The Deep South paradox runs through this data. Mississippi has the lowest median household income in the country, but it also has the lowest absolute childcare prices, and the prices fall faster than the wages. That ratio — what families actually have to scrape together for a daycare bill — is what the Affordability dimension measures, and on that question Mississippi is the most affordable state in America. The lived experience for a working-class family in Hattiesburg is materially less brutal than for a comparable family in Hartford, even with a quarter less income to start. The state's center prices have not chased coastal pricing because the local labor market has not let them: a Jackson center cannot charge $20,000 a year for an infant slot because no Jackson family would pay it, and the local wage structure means nobody on staff would expect compensation to support that price either.
Supply — 64/100
Supply scores 63.7 — Mississippi's second-strongest dimension and well above the national norm. The state's 868 licensed establishments produce a density of 4.9 centers per 1,000 kids under 5, above the 4.21 national figure. Licensed capacity totals 127,760 slots against a Bipartisan Policy Center demand baseline of 136,510 — a 14.6% supply gap, far below the 27.0% national gap.
The state benefits from a regulatory regime that has been historically permissive of in-home and faith-based providers. Many small-town childcare operations in Mississippi run out of churches and homes, which holds the per-establishment capacity down but spreads provider density wider than in states where center-based licensing dominates. The result is a supply system that looks adequate at the county level even where the absolute slot count is modest.
Where Mississippi runs into trouble is in the infant-and-toddler band, which is the most expensive ratio for providers to staff. Slot counts for under-twos thin out fast outside Jackson, Gulfport, and Tupelo, and rural counties in the Delta operate as functional childcare deserts even though the state-level numbers do not flag them. The supply story underneath the supply score is therefore a tale of two Mississippis — adequate density on average, with sharp underprovision in the regions where birth rates remain highest and household incomes lowest.
Workforce — 2/100
Workforce Health scores 2.0 — last in the country, and the structural cost the state pays for its low childcare prices. The median Mississippi childcare worker earns $10.46 an hour, $21,760 a year for full-time work. The single-adult living wage in Mississippi is $20.69 an hour. Wages cover 50.6% of basic costs — the lowest figure in our dataset, and almost twelve points below the 62.6% national norm.
This is the price the system charges back to the workforce in exchange for the low-cost care families enjoy. A lead teacher in a Jackson infant room earning the median wage cannot, on $21,760 a year, support a single adult at the basic family-budget threshold, much less raise her own children. Many do raise their own children, often by piecing together two jobs, family caregiving from grandparents, and the same Head Start and CCDF programs they help administer. State employment in the occupation totals 4,920 — small enough that a handful of center closures in any one county shifts the supply picture meaningfully.
The implication for retention is exactly what the wage data predicts. Provider turnover in Mississippi childcare is widely reported above 35% annually by sector advocates, and centers in growing markets like Madison and Olive Branch have begun openly competing for staff with Walmart and Dollar General — both of which now pay starting wages above what most Mississippi childcare centers can offer.
Family Strain — 32/100
Family Strain scores 32.4. Mothers' labor force participation for kids under 6 sits at 69.9%, slightly above the 68.2% national figure. The single-parent share is 40.1% — well above the national 31.8% — and is the dimension's main drag.
The high mothers' LFP figure in Mississippi reads less as a sign of access and more as a sign of necessity. The state's median household income is the lowest in the country, and a two-earner household is often the only stable path to a middle-class life. For the 40% of family households headed by a single parent — disproportionately concentrated in the Delta and Jackson metro — the strain is acute, even with the country's lowest-priced childcare. The math that works for a married Hattiesburg couple does not work for a single mother in Greenville, where local labor markets are thin, transportation networks are brittle, and even a $6,000 daycare bill represents a real share of disposable income.
Policy Support — 44/100
Policy Support scores 43.5, set at the state level and inherited by every Mississippi city. The dimension is held up by Mississippi's pre-K quality benchmarks — the state meets all 10 of NIEER's quality standards, one of only a handful of states to do so — and by a relatively well-developed Head Start network that enrolls about 19,939 children in regular Head Start plus 3,770 in Early Head Start, mostly serving the Delta and the southern coast.
What holds the score back is reach. State-funded pre-K serves only 20% of 4-year-olds and zero 3-year-olds, with per-pupil spending of $4,450. CCDF subsidies reach 20.8% of eligible children monthly — about 25,900 children — well below the national norm. There is no paid family leave program. Federal FMLA, unpaid, is the only statutory job-protected leave most Mississippi parents have access to. The combination of high quality and low reach is the same pattern visible in many southern states: Mississippi's pre-K classrooms are among the best in the country for the small share of children who get in.
City spotlight
Jackson is the only Mississippi city in the 250-city State of Childcare cohort, scoring 65 (Strong) and ranked 21 nationally — a top-tier finish that places the capital among the country's strongest large-city childcare markets on the index's headline metric. The arithmetic is unromantic: the country's lowest infant-care prices ($6,754 a year) divided into a $43,238 household income still produces an Affordability score of 90, and Hinds County's establishment density underwrites a Supply score of 98. Jackson also posts the highest mothers' labor force participation rate among large US cities — 83.8% of mothers with kids under 6 are working — a number that reads more as economic necessity than as abundant access in a metro where 64.7% of family households are headed by a single parent. Jackson's Strong-tier ranking comes despite, not because of, those structural pressures: cheap care plus thick local supply puts the city in the top 25, while a Workforce Health score near zero ($10.46 an hour, the country's lowest median wage for childcare workers) reminds the reader who pays for that affordability.
The remainder of Mississippi's childcare story plays out in small and mid-sized cities — Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Tupelo, Meridian, Starkville — none of which are large enough to crack the top 251. Their absence in the cohort is itself a feature of Mississippi's geography: the state's childcare system serves a population spread across small towns and unincorporated counties, not concentrated in metros.
In-home care in Mississippi
The professional in-home nanny market in Mississippi is among the smallest in the country in absolute terms, concentrated in the Jackson suburbs (Madison, Ridgeland, Brandon), the Gulf Coast (Ocean Springs, Long Beach), and the Oxford-Tupelo corridor. Career nanny rates in those markets typically run $15-$22 an hour — well below national averages but considerably above the state's center-based wage floor, which is part of why some experienced childcare workers move from centers into private homes when they can.
Nanny shares are uncommon outside Jackson and the Coast. The state's low center prices reduce the financial pressure that drives families elsewhere to share in-home care. Au pair placements are similarly limited, both because the host-family income required to sustain the program fee structure is rare in the state and because Mississippi's smaller international community offers fewer cultural-exchange anchors. Where in-home care exists in volume, it is more likely to be informal and family-based — grandmothers, aunts, and church networks — than the formal nanny-employer model that dominates higher-cost coastal markets. For a state where the center system already prices accessibly for the local economy, in-home care reads as a complement, not the substitute it has become elsewhere.
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-level Policy Support is inherited by all cities in the state. 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; Bipartisan Policy Center childcaregap.org (Sept 2025); NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook 2024; HHS ACF CCDF FY2023; National Partnership for Women & Families (March 2026).