As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, Wyoming has no cities among the largest 250 in the nation.
Wyoming has 216 licensed childcare establishments serving a state of fewer than 600,000 residents, the smallest population in the country. Center infant care averages $11,355 a year — about $5,800 below the national figure — and rents are the lowest in the Mountain West. The state has no public pre-K, no paid family leave, and CCDF subsidy reach near the bottom nationally. It nonetheless ranks third overall, behind only New Hampshire and Vermont, and ahead of every other state in the West. The result is part demographic accident: a small working-parent universe, modest in-migration, low housing pressure, and an oversized rural FCC network combine to produce a functional childcare environment without the policy infrastructure that anchors the top-ranked Northeast states. The model is not transferable. For Wyoming families, it is real.
Key highlights & actionable takeaways
- Moderate (65/100), 3rd nationally — the highest-ranking Mountain West state and one of the index's biggest surprises.
- 6.76 licensed establishments per 1,000 kids under 5, well above the 4.21 national rate; the BPC supply gap is 21.7%, among the country's smallest.
- No state pre-K, no paid family leave, $0 per-pupil pre-K spending; the high ranking reflects small-state demographic luck, not policy investment.
Affordability — 80/100
Wyoming posts a strong affordability score at 80.4 — center infant care averages $11,355 a year (NDCP, forward-projected to 2025), 15.2% of the state's $74,815 median household income. Both the dollar figure and the income ratio sit well below the national medians ($17,163 and 21.9%), and the affordability gap to most other states is meaningful: a typical Wyoming family pays roughly $5,800 less per year for infant center care than the national average.
The childcare-to-rent ratio is 0.98 — meaning a typical Wyoming family pays almost exactly the same for daycare as for rent, more favorable than the 1.06 national figure. The relationship is held in balance by Wyoming's low rent environment ($968 monthly median, the lowest in the Mountain West and among the lowest in the country) running in parallel with modest center-care prices. Family child care provides additional flexibility at $10,959 — close to center pricing rather than at the typical 65-75% discount, narrowing the FCC value differential.
Several structural features hold Wyoming's price floor down. The state's median household income is moderate but not low; what differentiates the state is a cost-of-living environment that has historically been favorable, particularly for housing, even after the energy-economy fluctuations that have driven Wyoming's economic cycles for decades. The state's regulatory environment for childcare is moderately permissive, which keeps barrier-to-entry costs lower for new providers. And Wyoming's small population — under 600,000 residents — means the demand pressure on existing supply is correspondingly small.
A typical Cheyenne or Casper family with one infant in center care and a 3-year-old in private preschool spends roughly $18,000-$20,000 a year on childcare — meaningful but materially less than equivalent families in Denver or Salt Lake City. The math works in Wyoming in a way it does not work in most of the rest of the Mountain West.
Supply — 88/100
Supply is one of Wyoming's strong dimensions at 88.2. The state runs 216 licensed establishments — 6.76 per 1,000 kids under 5, well above the 4.21 national rate, and the second-highest density in the Mountain West behind Montana.
The geography explains both the supply density and the supply paradox. Wyoming has 216 licensed providers spread across one of the largest land areas in the country, with the bulk of the state's population concentrated in a handful of cities — Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette, Rock Springs, Laramie, Sheridan, and Jackson — each anchoring a small economy. The licensed-care infrastructure has scaled to serve those cities at a comparatively favorable density. Outside those cities, most counties run on FCC and small-center networks operating at a county-of-population scale.
The 21.7% supply gap is among the better quartiles of the national distribution and reflects both the state's adequate licensed-slot count and its modest formal-need denominator. Wyoming has 22,700 licensed slots against an estimated 24,890 kids in formal need — a closer match than most states achieve. The state's small population, in absolute terms, is part of the explanation: with a working-parent universe one-tenth the size of Colorado's, the licensed-care infrastructure does not need to scale to anywhere near the absolute scale Colorado requires.
Workforce — 40/100
Workforce Health scores 40.2 — the second-weakest dimension. The median Wyoming childcare worker earns $13.25 an hour ($27,560 a year), well below the $15.41 national median. The state's $21.45 single-adult living wage is the lowest in the Mountain West, and wages cover 61.8% of basic costs — almost exactly the 62.6% national figure.
The workforce is small in absolute terms — 1,330 BLS-recorded childcare workers, the smallest of any state in the dataset — and constrains how rapidly any new licensed center can stand up infant rooms. The state's centers and FCCs operate on thin margins, and the wages are constrained by both the state's low public investment in childcare and the broader low-wage environment in service-sector employment. Wyoming's tax-and-regulation posture has produced a low-wage labor market across multiple sectors, and childcare is no exception.
The retention picture is mixed. In the larger cities (Cheyenne, Casper, Laramie), turnover is elevated relative to long-tenured FCC providers in the smaller communities. In rural Wyoming, FCC providers operate as small businesses with stable household economics — many run for decades from the same home — and the workforce there looks more stable than the headline state-level figures suggest.
The Jackson Hole anomaly deserves a note. Teton County's housing costs are among the highest in the country relative to local wages, and Jackson childcare wages sit far below what is needed to live in the valley. The result is one of the country's most structurally broken local childcare workforce markets, with most Jackson childcare workers commuting from Idaho across Teton Pass — a workforce arrangement with no equivalent elsewhere in Wyoming.
Family Strain — 60/100
Family Strain scores 59.8 — the third-strongest dimension. Mothers' labor force participation for kids under 6 is 67.0%, almost exactly at the 68.2% national figure. Single-parent share is 27.5% — below the 31.8% national figure, in line with the broader Mountain West pattern.
The numbers describe a state with structural conditions for parenting that are roughly favorable in aggregate. Wyoming's working-parent population is anchored by a mix of professional households in Cheyenne, Casper, and Laramie, and a service-and-trades workforce concentrated in the energy-economy communities and the small-town governmental and ranching economies of the rest of the state. The family-strain math is moderately favorable in aggregate but materially harder in Teton County, where housing costs have moved sharply against young families since 2015.
The relatively low single-parent share moderates the Family Strain score, and the moderate mothers' LFP suggests the state's childcare environment is not creating a substantial labor-market exit pressure on second earners — an unusual achievement for a state with no state-funded pre-K and no public family leave.
Policy Support — 23/100
Policy Support scores 23.2 — set at the state level and inherited by every Wyoming city. The 23.2 is the weakest of the state's five dimensions and reflects Wyoming'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 15.7% of eligible kids monthly (2,500 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. The state legislature has not appropriated meaningful new ongoing funding for the childcare sector in recent years, and the Wyoming political landscape has not produced the legislative consensus that built early-childhood investment in neighboring Colorado or New Mexico.
The 23.2 Policy Support score is one of the lower numbers in the dataset, and its presence in a state that ranks 3rd overall is the central paradox of the Wyoming report. The state's high ranking is a function of low prices, adequate supply density, low demand pressure, and a small total population — not of policy investment. The model is not transferable to states with larger populations and tighter labor markets, but it is a real result for the families living in Wyoming today.
City spotlight
Wyoming has no cities included in the index city-level dataset. The city ranking covers the 250 largest US cities; Wyoming's largest city, Cheyenne, has roughly 65,000 residents — well below that population threshold. The state-level State of Childcare score therefore represents the full picture of measured childcare conditions in Wyoming.
For directional context: Cheyenne and Laramie, which together anchor the I-80 corridor and host the bulk of the state's professional and academic workforce, operate at affordability and supply scores in line with the state average. Casper and Gillette, the energy-economy cities of central and northeastern Wyoming, run at slightly thinner supply and higher workforce-retention pressure. Jackson Hole operates as a separate luxury market with conditions resembling Aspen or Vail more than the rest of Wyoming — sharply tighter supply, dramatically higher in-home care rates, and a workforce that largely commutes from Idaho.
In-home care in Wyoming
The state's in-home care market is small, geographically dispersed, and structured very differently from coastal-metro markets. Career nanny rates in Cheyenne, Casper, and Laramie run roughly $16-$22 an hour for full-time engagements — among the lowest rate bands in the country, reflecting both the local cost of living and the state's modest professional-workforce density.
Multigenerational households are common across rural Wyoming, 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 energy economies have long operated on models that integrate extended-family child supervision into daily life — patterns that don't show up in formal-care statistics but are part of the structural reason Wyoming's family-strain numbers are not worse.
Jackson Hole is the exception that proves the rule. Teton County supports an unusually deep and expensive in-home care market driven by the second-home owners, the Jackson Hole hospitality and tourism economy, and a small but high-net-worth professional community. Career nanny rates in Jackson routinely exceed $30 an hour, and the supply constraint is among the tightest in the country during ski season. Most Jackson nannies — like much of the rest of the Jackson workforce — commute from Idaho across Teton Pass, with the workforce structurally distinct from the rest of Wyoming.
Au pair placements elsewhere in Wyoming are rare. Nanny shares are essentially absent outside small Cheyenne and Laramie professional clusters. The state's working-parent population mostly does not interact with the formal in-home care market on the terms typical of larger US metros.
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).