Illinois Answers Project: ‘We are at the mercy of child care’: Why does Illinois’ largest subsidy exclude thousands?

by Madison Hopkins and Meredith Newman
Illinois Answers Project

CHICAGO — A single mother in Kenwood changed jobs in order to find child care – even though it meant possibly working fewer hours and less pay.

A couple in Park Ridge has paid so much for care they haven’t been able to start a college fund for their toddler.

A family in Lemont delayed buying a home and decided against having as many children as they once hoped for.

Child care has become one of the biggest line items in a family’s budget, with its costs growing faster than any other household expense in recent decades.

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It forces parents to make tough decisions – ultimately stalling the chance for families to advance financially and professionally, according to dozens of interviews and responses to an Illinois Answers Project survey of child care workers and families.

“We’re at the mercy of child care,” said one working mother, who is pregnant with her third child and expects she and her husband will pay $54,000 for child care in the coming year. It’s roughly a quarter of their annual income.

The financial health of the child care industry is inextricably linked to the larger economy, with both short- and long-term impacts. Access to affordable, reliable child care has the immediate benefit of allowing parents to work or attend school, providing a stable workforce for businesses and putting more cash in the pockets of young families.

The Child Care Assistance Program, also known as CCAP, is the largest government child care subsidy. It significantly reduces monthly costs for families and it can be an essential source of income for child care businesses, particularly in Cook County.

Yet it doesn’t provide enough relief for many families and providers, an Illinois Answers Project investigation found.

Illinois continues to put limits on CCAP far stricter than federal recommendations. These restrictions exclude up to 130,000 children, who could be eligible under national guidelines, from receiving support, according to the most recent estimates of Illinois’ program.

The state also caps payments for some child care providers at rates that are near the lowest in the nation.

These restrictions, studies show, can impact a family’s ability to provide stability, pursue higher paying jobs and set up their children for lifelong success.

The number of child care providers that participate in CCAP has also plummeted in recent years, the investigation found.

Gov. JB Pritzker has sought to make Illinois a leader in providing accessible early childhood services, investing hundreds of millions of dollars a year into programs to improve provider pay, grow child care availability and expand access to public preschool.

Since taking office in 2019, the Pritzker administration has instituted some changes to expand access to the CCAP subsidy.

“Looking ahead, the state will continue to work diligently to equitably expand and improve our child care system for Illinois’ families,” Summer Griffith, a public information officer for the Illinois Department of Human Services – the state agency that oversees CCAP – wrote in an email to Illinois Answers.

But these improvements are still far from offsetting effects of the drastic cuts to the program made a decade ago. And the new rules instituted by Pritzker for qualifying for the program are still stricter than those in many other states, limiting program access primarily to families that earn below an income threshold that some say is far too low – particularly in expensive areas like Chicago.

Depending on the type of care for their infant, parents spend between a median of $900 to $1,200 each month on child care – which can be up to 15% of the median family income in Cook County. Parents told Illinois Answers they spend more.

And there is no guarantee child care spots will be available, even in Chicago where there are many more providers than in most rural areas in the state. One 2023 estimate found there were only enough formal child care slots, at places like centers and licensed home care, in Cook County to care for about 25% of the children who need them.

“Searching, navigating, and finding childcare is a nightmare,” said Breann Cornell, a mother of three in northern Cook County.

“It really is something affecting whether people decide to have children or not because it’s not just if we want one, it’s if we can afford one.”

The struggle to qualify

This spring, Tasia Powell gave birth to a baby girl, Jai. She started looking for affordable child care before her daughter was even born, but wasn’t able to find many realistic options.

Powell works at a Chicago nonprofit that provides homelessness services, where she said she earns a few hundred dollars over the limit to qualify for subsidized child care, including CCAP. Yet without any help, Powell said the financial burden will be significant.

“You want people to work … but then you work too much. And if you work less, then you can’t afford your actual other bills,” she said.

“That puts a lot of people in a bad circumstance.”

Powell’s situation is not unique.

Parents navigating today’s child care options, and the programs to help pay for them, face a complicated landscape of differing eligibility rules, which can sometimes lock them out of much-needed assistance.

CCAP, for example, is one of the most widely used child care support programs across the country.

Federal rules state that a family can earn no more than 85% of their state’s median income in order to initially qualify for CCAP. But states are allowed to set their own lower thresholds, an option Illinois officials have taken advantage of for years.

Pritzker has increased CCAP initial eligibility twice during his tenure as governor, most recently in 2022. The state also expanded eligibility in other ways by including families with parents deployed in the military – regardless of income – and excluding other sources of income like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, child support and social security payments, among other programs.

But it still falls far short of federal recommendations, excluding tens of thousands of potentially eligible Illinois children from receiving support.

Today, an Illinois family of three can only earn up to $4,841 a month, or about 61% of the state’s median income to be initially accepted to the program. Under the maximum federal rules, that number would be $6,704.

Many families, providers and advocates argue that the current income limit is still far too low, pointing out that the rules don’t take into account where a family is located in the state. Families living downstate have the same income cutoffs as those in Cook County, where the cost of living is up to 30% higher.

An IDHS spokeswoman pointed to how Illinois’ CCAP income limit as a percent of the state’s median income is higher than some neighboring Midwest states.

Among all states, Illinois ranks 25th in the country for its income eligibility level for a family of three.

The spokeswoman also said that if Illinois were to expand eligibility rules beyond what the budget could currently accommodate, the state would need to institute a waitlist for families to receive the subsidy – which could “inject inequity.”

Without a waitlist, “all eligible families can receive the help they need when they need it,” the spokeswoman said.

Many other states also refrain from using wait lists for CCAP services, which can create more administrative burdens for government agencies to track and keep up-to-date. But states that do use wait lists often guarantee services for certain families or prioritize which families receive services faster.

But the current income restrictions still leave families feeling trapped.

One parent wrote to the health department in 2021 about how their family was “barely making it.” It was one among the dozens of emails Illinois Answers obtained through a public records request that showed the difficulties families and providers face with the subsidy.

“Being part of the lower middle class is really affecting us,” they wrote, “I just started working and because they use our gross income they say we make too much for daycare help.

“We are barely staying afloat and can’t afford for me to quit or afford for me to stay working.”

Pritzker’s increases to the CCAP initial income eligibility levels have created a positive, though moderate, impact. Total enrollment has increased each year after the income threshold increase in 2022, when the state began recovering from the pandemic.

A March 2025 report by Chapin Hall, a research group at the University of Chicago, found that in 2023, 42% of eligible Illinois children ages 0-2 and 48% of children ages 3-5 were enrolled in CCAP.

However, the total number of children enrolled in CCAP  in fiscal year 2024 was still down roughly 18% compared to 2015, when the total number of children served was at its highest in the last decade, according to Illinois Answers analysis.

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IDHS officials, in response, said their internal data of certificate payments shows that CCAP participation has returned to 2015 levels – in terms of the monthly averages of children served by the subsidy. There was a monthly average of 137,968 for the calendar year 2015. As of January to April 2025, the monthly average of CCAP enrollment has been 143,006, according to IDHS officials.

Former Gov. Bruce Rauner made drastic cuts to Illinois’ income limit in July 2015, in which it was estimated at the time that only 10% of once eligible families could qualify. The program lost about one-third of its participating children from 2015 to fall 2018.

Another common problem cited by parents is looking for a job – but needing child care in order to do so.

Parents need to work or attend school in order to be eligible for CCAP. But many parents report struggling to find the time to interview or search for jobs without already having reliable child care.

During the pandemic, Illinois temporarily waived these rules, allowing parents to receive CCAP services for up to three months while they searched for a job or educational opportunity.

The initiative was widely praised as a success. One survey of participating Cook County parents  found two-thirds of respondents reported getting a job during their three-month windows and another 10% enrolled in school.

But in July 2024, the state chose to end the special allowance, citing the expiration of federal COVID funding. State officials estimated 8,400 families used this service from October 2021 to June 2024.

A Mason City foster mother, who cares for her young relatives in central Illinois, has been out of work as a waitress. She said it has been frustrating to be told she needs to get a job to qualify for CCAP – without first getting the child care she desperately needs.

“You get pre-approved for a home loan,” she said. “Why can’t you get pre-approved for child care?”

Falling off an economic cliff

Once a family is enrolled in CCAP, they must follow strict rules to remain in the program, including keeping their income level below the state’s redetermination limit – a figure slightly higher than the maximum income they could earn to first qualify for the program.

For some families this means that getting a raise – even a small one – could leave them financially worse-off than before.

“One penny over the amount, and you fall off – so it’s like falling off a cliff,” said Kimberly Bianchini, owner at Advance Preschool in Hoffman Estates.

The University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab found a small increase in earnings could cost families access to CCAP, leaving them with less money overall and making it nearly impossible to afford child care while also paying for other basic life necessities.

Researchers studied CCAP to understand the barriers to economic mobility, using a Cook County family of three – one adult with two young children – as an example.

A small raise from $54,000 to $55,000 could mean this hypothetical family loses access to CCAP, according to the analysis, resulting in a net loss of about $25,000 per year.

Eligibility restrictions, researchers found, often make it more difficult for participants to increase their salaries or have enough in savings to make “meaningful investments in upward mobility.”

In Cook County, a family with a 2-year-old in a child care center spends nearly 15% of their income on child care costs. This is more than double what the federal government says is an affordable amount.

According to one estimate, it isn’t until a Cook County family begins to earn close to $200,000 a year – or 900% of the federal poverty level – that the percentage of their income dedicated to child care starts to reach a level the federal government deems affordable.

But those families say otherwise.

Interviews with Cook County parents who make that much or more said child care costs have become so burdensome that they are held at economic standstills and it impacts their ability to secure their kids’ financial futures.

These parents, some of whom now out earn the middle class families they were raised in, said the cost of child care for multiple children can be upwards of $55,000 a year. They said they were unable to stow away money for their children’s futures and have no disposable income.

“My wife’s parents and my parents, because they grew up so differently, they’re consistently looking at us like: ‘You guys are doing great, you don’t need help,’” said one Evanston mother of two young children.

“We’re not though,” she said. “This isn’t the world you grew up in.”

A system that runs ‘on the backs’ of child care providers

Each school day, as owner of Imani Children’s Academy, Marianne Powell dressed up professionally.

“I dress up because this is my job,” she would tell parents when she took over the center from her late mother. “This is my career. I want you to take me seriously.”

Running the business was a challenge. Historically, a majority of the center’s Roseland families were below the poverty level, Powell said, estimating that 75% to 80% of the business’ funding came from CCAP.

It all took a “nosedive” during the pandemic, she said. Kids didn’t return. Enrollment dropped from about 30 students to just five. Staff quit.

Powell closed the center in 2023 after three decades in business. She enrolled in school to become an esthetician.

“I love kids, but I’m a business,” she said. “I need to get paid.”

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In interviews with more than a dozen current and former Cook County providers, many like Powell remarked on how difficult it is to maintain a business when the child care industry’s economic model is fundamentally flawed. The costs parents pay – though exorbitant – often still fail to offset how expensive it is to provide quality care in line with important health and safety standards.

Providers, in turn, are forced to keep their rates artificially low in order to maintain enough clients to stay in business, even if that means they take home little-to-no wages. For example, to keep costs down, home-based providers sometimes forgo paying themselves set salaries, instead adjusting their take-home pay month by month when operation costs are too high and tuition payments too low.

“They’re not funded for the true cost of care,” Marcia Stoll, assistant director of research for Illinois Action for Children, said about child care businesses. “It’s the child care workers that are being punished. It’s like we’re running this system on their backs because they’re so underpaid and because you can’t charge parents more because they just can’t afford any more.”

An Illinois Answers’ analysis of state child care data found the total number of providers that accept CCAP payments dropped by more than 60% in the past decade.

The state determines how much CCAP subsidizes the amount parents pay by completing a study of current child care prices and availability across different age groups and areas.

Federal guidelines recommend states use that information to set payment amounts that would reasonably allow a parent to afford 75% of the available child care options in their area. The goal is to give CCAP parents the same ability as parents without subsidies to choose a high-quality option that fits their particular needs.

Illinois is among the bottom 15 states when it comes to the number of choices the CCAP subsidy provides families in terms center-based care. The state’s CCAP payments to center-based care providers can reportedly only cover 50% or less of available options across all age groups. For preschoolers specifically, the subsidy rate can only cover 41% of the tuition for center-based providers – a rate so low it violates federal equal access provisions.

Illinois is within the top 10 in the nation for licensed family child care for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

An IDHS spokeswoman said center-based care tends to be more expensive, adding that a majority of CCAP providers are license-exempt family child care providers. This category cares for three or less children.

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In Cook County, the subsidy amount fails to meet the 75% goal for all types of providers and age groups and the numbers are even lower in some northern Illinois suburbs, according to the state’s most recent survey.

However, an IDHS spokeswoman said family child care homes in Illinois have received rate increases since the most recent market rate survey.

In some rural areas of Illinois, where child care is typically harder to find but much cheaper, CCAP subsidies are reportedly high enough to purchase nearly all child care options in the market.

Some providers complained of payment delays, which they said put their businesses at even greater financial jeopardy. While new federal rules require states to change the way they pay providers to create more stability, Illinois requested a waiver to allow the state until 2026 to comply.

“I can’t wait so long” one person wrote to the state in January about delayed payments, “my bills will get shut off and my landlord will make me move so please help me.”

Within the overall decline of CCAP providers, there is also a change in the type of providers available for families, as the number of home-based providers dropped significantly while the number of larger child care centers remained relatively stable.

Some families may prefer family-home providers over centers, which typically care for smaller groups of children in more personal settings and tend to offer flexible schedules, such as late-night, early-morning or overnight care. Forty percent of Cook County CCAP parents potentially need such options, according to an Illinois Action for Children survey. In contrast, other families may prefer larger centers with more resources and more structured environments.

This decline in home-based CCAP providers means fewer options for parents to select the best type of provider for their needs.

This was the case for Denika Berry, a Kenwood mom to two children with special needs. She had difficulty finding CCAP providers that could cover her overnight shift at a fast food restaurant. It forced Berry to change shifts, which meant fewer hours and less income.

Berry said she relied on a patchwork of providers, at times being forced to pay out of pocket for a non-CCAP provider. She said she often had to leave work early to pick up her children for alleged behavior reasons or short staffing. She worried she could lose her job.

“With me constantly leaving work,” she said, “just imagine – my check is shorter.”

‘I can’t wait to be liberated from child care costs’

Last June, at a Rogers Park child care center called Eyes on the Future Childhood Development Center, Pritzker signed legislation that he said would usher in a new era for the state – the creation of the new Department of Early Childhood.

Life, the governor said, will become “simpler, better and fairer” for families with the new department. CCAP will be housed there, in addition to other early childhood programs that were once dispersed at three different agencies.

It’s all part of Pritzker’s efforts to make Illinois first in the country for childhood services through Smart Start Illinois, which the administration says will improve child care provider pay and expand access to accessible, high-quality options for families.

Smart Start aims to address the childcare workforce shortage by offering new grants to providers in hopes of increasing wages.

Nearly every child care service owner interviewed by Illinois Answers was complimentary about Pritzker – in part because they felt he was the first governor in recent history to prioritize early childhood services.

These grants, they said, are a welcome infusion for those who are able to get it but they also noted that the eligibility restrictions make it difficult for Chicago providers in particular to access them.

But they are only available to providers whose only form of public assistance is from CCAP payments. In Chicago, providers rely on a range of public support options, such as Head Start or Preschool For All funding, much more frequently than their downstate counterparts.

City providers are then faced with a choice: drop their other forms of public assistance in favor of Smart Start grants, which are dependent on annual budget renewals by the state legislature, or forgo the new funds altogether.

An IDHS spokesperson said the state “continues to gather feedback and adapt the program to best serve providers and families.” The feedback IDHS said they received included offering a wage of $17-$19 per hour to recruit and retain staff, and making the grants “stable, predictable, and transparent.” These business owners didn’t want to receive the grant one year and then lose it the next year.

Providers also suggested that the grants should be “prioritized for child care programs with limited access to additional resources.” This is why the grants are targeted only toward providers who receive CCAP funding, the spokesperson said.

For those who don’t qualify, the hit is compounded by the exodus of 4-year-olds from private child care facilities, which created a massive disruption to a common business model among Chicago providers, they said.

In recent years, the city expanded its public school system to create enough slots for every 4-year-old to attend free preschool. But while this creates a clear financial benefit to parents, child care providers outside of the public school system say it is a devastating blow to their operations.

Caring for preschool-aged children is generally much less expensive than infants and toddlers, who have lower adult-to-child ratio requirements and therefore incur bigger staffing costs. Many providers have traditionally taken on larger numbers of 3- and 4-year olds to offset these expenses and stay financially afloat.

For parents, the change alleviates the cost of an entire year of child care, but if providers don’t find a way to recoup the loss, it could mean more closures and fewer options for families with younger children.

Natalie Reillo, an Austin mother of two, is considering sending her 3-year-old son to a CPS preschool in the next year. She has been on CCAP for the past decade, first for her almost 10 -year-old daughter and now for her 3-year-old son.

Reillo has had a positive experience with the government subsidy. She estimates child care would take up nearly all of her $3,400 monthly salary without it. But with the subsidy, she pays about $240 a month, allowing her to better afford her other bills and household expenses.

Still, the idea of moving to free child care when her son turns four is just too appealing, she said.

“I can’t wait to be liberated from daycare costs,” she said.