Child care subsidies provide an important support for families with low incomes, helping them to access affordable, high-quality, and stable child care arrangements. However, funding for child care subsidies is limited, and many eligible families do not receive assistance. To better understand families’ access to the child care subsidy system in Georgia—also known as Childcare and Parent Services (CAPS)—Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) partnered with the Urban Institute to assess how both eligibility for and participation in CAPS subsidies varied across the state. We present findings for how many children and families are eligible for assistance and what percentage of eligible children and families receive assistance. We show detailed estimates for different demographic groups and for different geographic areas of the state.

Why This Matters

Access to child care helps support parents and guardians as they work, attend training, or complete education programs, and also supports children in their critical developmental years. Across the United States, the high price of child care presents a significant challenge for families with low incomes. In Georgia—the focus of our analysis—the average price of having an infant in center-based care equaled almost one-third of the median income for single-parent and single-guardian families in the state in 2023. With the high price of child care, coupled with the important role that stable child care plays in supporting child development and parental work and activities, child care subsidies provide a way for many families to access paid child care.

Understanding more about families’ eligibility for and participation in the child care subsidy program can help inform efforts to connect families and children with critical child care supports. While state data show the number of participating families and children, little is known about how many families and children are eligible for the program and the share of eligible children and families who do not receive benefits. Our analysis seeks to fill this gap by providing new evidence about how many families and children are eligible for child care assistance in Georgia, what percentage are able to access benefits, and how this differs across key demographic groups and across areas of the state.

What We Found

Our estimates for this analysis focus on 2019 (using a combined five-year file of American Community Survey data), as this was the most recent nonpandemic data available at the time we began the analysis. Increases in program funding and rapidly changing child care policies enacted during the pandemic make it difficult to draw conclusions from estimates using data from years during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis of eligibility and participation in 2019 shows the following:

• All children and families
  • Eligibility. In total, 281,000 children in 155,000 families are eligible for child care subsidies in Georgia. For children, this reflects that 16 percent of all children in Georgia are eligible for child care assistance.
  • Participation. About one-quarter of eligible children and families receive subsidies.
• Different child age groups
  • Eligibility. Children age 4 and younger make up 37 percent of eligible children, while school-age children make up close to two-thirds of eligible children.
  • Participation. Among eligible children, participation rates vary across age groups. When we look at three age groupings—birth through age 4, ages 5 through 8, and age 9 and older—we find that children from birth through age 4 have the highest participation rate, with 35 percent of eligible children in this group receiving subsidies.
• Families with different income levels
  • Eligibility. About 20 percent of eligible families had incomes below 50 percent of the federal poverty guidelines, and another 39 percent had incomes between 50 and 100 percent of the poverty guidelines.
  • Participation. Among eligible families with countable income below 50 percent of the poverty guidelines, 59 percent receive subsidies.
• Across areas of the state
  • Eligibility. Eligibility varies widely across the state. Almost one-third of eligible children live in the five most populous counties (Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, and Chatham). Across the state, eligibility rates varied from 4.6 percent in Cherokee County to 29.2 percent in Bibb County.
  • Participation. Participation rates across the state also varied widely, with Whitfield County having the lowest participation rate among eligible children (6.5 percent), and Clayton County having the highest participation rate among eligible children (41.6 percent). Generally, counties around major urban areas (Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, Macon, Columbus, Albany, and Valdosta) had higher participation rates than the rest of the state.

How We Did It

We used the Analysis of Transfers, Taxes, and Income Security (ATTIS) microsimulation model to estimate eligibility for the CAPS program. ATTIS is a comprehensive set of computer programs that applies the rules of benefit programs to each household in the American Community Survey data to estimate whether some or all people in the household are eligible for the program.

Program participation rates are estimated by dividing the number of children and families receiving the benefit by the number who are estimated to be eligible for the benefit—by state, in total and for specific subgroups. The numbers of children and families receiving the benefits in 2019 are obtained from Georgia’s DECAL.