Understanding whether the child care supply is adequate is essential to ensuring families can work, attend school, and support their children’s development. When supply falls short, families may struggle to find care that meets their needs, limiting parents’ ability to work or pursue education and hindering children’s ability to thrive. 

The Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) contracted with a team at the Urban Institute to conduct a study in 2024–25 that would help them better understand and estimate licensed child care supply across Georgia. As part of this partnership, we conducted a web-based survey of licensed child care learning centers and family child care learning homes in February and March 2025. This work is part of a multiyear partnership between DECAL and Urban’s early childhood team. 

This brief focuses on the actual supply of child care in Georgia. While it is common to use licensed capacity as the primary measure of supply, this is not an accurate measure of supply because there can be differences in the number of slots that a child care provider is licensed for (licensed capacity), how many slots they would like to offer (desired capacity), and how many slots they actually enroll (enrollment). The difference between desired capacity and enrollment captures a program’s unused supply, while the number of children waiting for a slot (waiting lists) relative to enrollment provides some indication of the demand for child care that the provider cannot meet. The agency wanted to better understand these differences.

What We Learned

Some of the key findings include the following:

• Licensed child care capacity for child care centers overestimates both the number of child care slots providers wish to fill and the number of children they currently serve in Georgia.
• Licensed child care capacity is fairly close to the number currently served in family child care homes.
• About half of providers had waiting lists, including 59 percent of centers and 43 percent of homes. For centers, the highest proportion of children on waiting lists relative to children enrolled were infants and then school-age children. Many providers with waiting lists also had unfilled slots.

The findings of this brief underscore the importance of looking beyond licensed capacity when trying to understand the real supply of child care.