As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, Montana has no cities among the largest 250 in the nation.
Montana runs 525 licensed childcare establishments across one of the largest land areas in the country, serving a population concentrated in seven small cities — Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman, Butte, Helena, and Kalispell. That works out to 8.92 establishments per 1,000 kids under five, more than double the national rate of 4.21 and the highest density in the Mountain West. The state has no public pre-K, no paid family leave, and a CCDF subsidy reach below national norms; it nonetheless ranks 11th. Affordability is moderate, supply density is exceptional, and rural multigenerational households absorb a meaningful share of the demand the formal system never sees. The Bozeman post-2020 cost-of-living spike is the visible pressure point on an otherwise unusually quiet childcare picture.
Key highlights & actionable takeaways
- Moderate (61/100), 11th nationally — third in the Mountain West behind Wyoming and Idaho.
- Establishment density runs 8.92 per 1,000 kids under 5 — more than double the 4.21 national rate, the highest in the Mountain West.
- No state pre-K, no paid family leave, $0 per-pupil pre-K spending; the high ranking reflects supply density and modest demand, not policy.
Affordability — 60/100
Montana's affordability picture is moderately favorable. Center infant care averages $12,924 a year (NDCP, forward-projected to 2025), 18.5% of the state's $69,922 median household income. Both the dollar figure and the income ratio sit modestly below the national medians ($17,163 and 21.9%), and the affordability dimension scores 60.1.
The childcare-to-rent ratio is 1.04, very close to the 1.06 national figure — meaning a typical Montana family pays roughly the same for daycare as for rent. The relationship is held in balance by Montana's low rent environment ($1,031 monthly median, the lowest in the Mountain West) running in parallel with modest center-care prices. Family child care provides additional flexibility at $9,900 — a meaningful 23% discount to center care — and FCC operates as the dominant care setting in much of the state outside the larger metros.
Several structural features hold Montana's price floor down. Median household income is moderate but not high; the state's lower cost of living has historically made middle-income lifestyles workable on lower nominal earnings. The state's regulatory environment for childcare is moderately permissive, which keeps barrier-to-entry costs lower for new providers. And Montana's historical pattern of multigenerational rural families living near each other has supported a large informal-care substitution layer that takes pressure off the formal-paid market.
A typical Bozeman or Missoula family with one infant in center care and a 3-year-old in part-time preschool spends roughly $20,000-$22,000 a year on childcare — meaningfully more than the state average, reflecting the post-2020 cost-of-living spike in Montana's two largest growth metros. The state-average affordability picture has begun to mask sharper internal divergence over the past five years, with Bozeman in particular running at affordability levels closer to Boise or Salt Lake City than to the rural Montana baseline.
Supply — 96/100
Supply is Montana's exceptional dimension at 96.1 — the strongest state-level supply score in the Mountain West and one of the highest in the country. Montana runs 525 licensed establishments — 8.92 per 1,000 kids under 5, more than double the 4.21 national rate, and the highest density in the Mountain West.
The geography explains both the supply density and the supply paradox. Montana has 525 licensed providers spread across one of the largest land areas in the country, with the bulk of the state's population concentrated in seven cities — Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman, Butte, Helena, and Kalispell — each anchoring a small metro economy. The licensed-care infrastructure has scaled to serve those metros at a comparatively favorable density. Outside the seven cities, most rural counties run on FCC and small-center networks operating at a county-of-population scale.
The 47.1% supply gap by the BPC measure is wider than the establishment density would suggest and reflects two things: licensed slots per establishment are smaller in Montana than in larger-state averages (many rural FCCs operate at the lower end of their licensed capacity), and the state's working-parent population has grown faster than its licensed slot count over the past decade, particularly in the Gallatin Valley and Flathead Valley.
The exceptional supply density is one of the structural reasons Montana ranks 11th nationally despite middling scores elsewhere. The state has more childcare options per child than nearly anywhere else in the country, even if many of those options are small-scale, FCC-based, or located further from the highest-demand counties than would be ideal.
Workforce — 43/100
Workforce Health scores 43.1 — middling. The median Montana childcare worker earns $15.11 an hour ($31,440 a year), in line with the $15.41 national median. The state's $24.23 single-adult living wage is just below national, and wages cover 62.4% of basic costs — almost exactly at the 62.6% national figure.
The workforce is small in absolute terms — 2,070 BLS-recorded childcare workers — and constrains how rapidly any new licensed center can expand infant capacity. The post-2020 cost-of-living spike in Bozeman and Missoula has put particular pressure on center workforce retention in those metros; centers have raised wages where they can, but the pace has not matched local housing-cost growth. Lead teachers in Bozeman now routinely commute from Belgrade, Manhattan, or Three Forks to keep housing costs manageable, adding 60-90 minutes of commute time to a job that pays at the survival edge.
The retention picture is more stable in the smaller eastern Montana metros (Billings, Great Falls, Miles City), where the cost-of-living-to-wage gap is narrower and many FCC providers operate as long-tenured small businesses with stable household economics.
Family Strain — 53/100
Family Strain scores 52.9 — middling. Mothers' labor force participation for kids under 6 is 66.4%, slightly below the 68.2% national figure. Single-parent share is 28.8% — below the 31.8% national figure but above neighboring Idaho and Wyoming.
The numbers describe a state with structural conditions for parenting that are mostly in line with national norms. Montana's working-parent population is anchored by a mix of professional households in Bozeman, Missoula, and Helena, and a service-and-trades workforce in the smaller eastern Montana metros. The family-strain math is moderately favorable in aggregate but materially harder in the high-cost growth metros, where housing-to-income ratios have moved sharply against young families since 2020.
The dual pattern is best illustrated by the unrepresented sub-state spread: Bozeman families operate in a high-cost-of-living environment that resembles Boise or Salt Lake City, while Billings or Great Falls families operate in a lower-cost environment closer to the rural Montana baseline. The state's average obscures the divergence.
Policy Support — 29/100
Policy Support scores 29.4 — set at the state level and inherited by every Montana city. The 29.4 is the weakest of the state's five dimensions and reflects Montana's longstanding political consensus against substantial public early-childhood investment. The state has no public pre-K program at all (0% of 4-year-olds, 0% of 3-year-olds enrolled in state-funded pre-K), one of only five US states without one. Per-pupil pre-K spending is $0.
CCDF subsidy reach is 19.0% of eligible kids monthly (3,200 served), at the low end of national norms. There is no state-administered paid family leave program; new parents rely on FMLA's unpaid 12-week guarantee and individual-employer benefits. Montana voters have rejected several state-level early-childhood initiatives over the past decade, and the legislature has not appropriated meaningful new ongoing funding for the sector since.
The 29.4 Policy Support score is one of the lower numbers in the dataset, and its presence in a state that ranks 11th overall is part of why Montana is one of the more interesting cases in the index. The state's high ranking is a function of low prices, high supply density, and moderate demand pressure — not of policy investment.
City spotlight
Montana has no cities included in the index city-level dataset. The city ranking covers the 250 largest US cities; Montana's seven cities are all below that population threshold, even Billings (roughly 120,000 residents), the state's largest. The state-level State of Childcare score therefore represents the full picture of measured childcare conditions in Montana, with the understanding that sub-state variance — particularly between Bozeman and the eastern Montana metros — is substantial and not captured in the headline number.
For directional context: the Bozeman, Missoula, and Helena metros operate at lower affordability scores and tighter supply pressure than the state average suggests, while Billings, Great Falls, and Butte run at affordability scores in line with or above the state average. The mountain-resort communities — Whitefish, Big Sky, the Bitterroot Valley — operate as separate small markets with substantial second-home and seasonal-workforce dynamics.
In-home care in Montana
The state's in-home care market is small, geographically dispersed, and structured very differently from the coastal-metro markets. Career nanny rates in the higher-cost Bozeman and Missoula metros run roughly $20-$28 an hour for full-time engagements — well below coastal-metro levels, comparable to Boise. In the smaller eastern Montana metros, formal nanny placements are uncommon; most rural Montana families that use paid in-home care do so through extended-family arrangements, neighbor exchanges, or small-scale FCC providers operating under licensed-home registration.
Multigenerational households are common across rural Montana, and grandparent-as-primary-caregiver arrangements substitute for paid in-home care for a substantial share of working families. The state's working-ranch and farm economy has long operated on a model where extended-family child supervision is integrated into daily work life — a pattern that doesn't show up in formal-care statistics but is one of the quiet reasons Montana's family-strain and supply-gap numbers are not worse.
Au pair placements in Montana are rare and concentrated in a small cluster of high-end Bozeman and resort-area households. Nanny shares are essentially absent outside a handful of professional Bozeman and Missoula clusters. The Bozeman tech and remote-worker influx since 2020 is producing increased demand for professional in-home care, and the market there looks materially deeper today than it did five years ago — though the supply of career nannies has not scaled at the same pace as demand.
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).