The COVID-19 pandemic brought tremendous and rapid change to the child care market across the country. Many home-based providers closed in spring 2020, but the home-based care supply recovered quickly and served a higher share of families than in prepandemic times by the following summer. Studying these trends and how they progressed throughout the pandemic is important to understand the postpandemic supply of home-based child care.

This brief presents findings from the first study to examine detailed data on the supply of home-based child care—defined here as the number of licensed facilities and total licensed capacity in those facilities—in the District of Columbia in the wake of COVID-19. Specifically, we found the following:

• As of September 2022, the overall supply of DC’s home-based child care (across smaller homes licensed for no more than 6 children and expanded homes licensed for 7 to 12 children) had nearly recovered from pandemic-related effects, after decreasing during the pandemic’s height.
• The number of smaller homes dropped, while the number of expanded homes increased, continuing prepandemic trends.
• There were additional changes in the composition of smaller and expanded homes in the District by Ward, nontraditional-hour child care provision, age groups served, subsidy voucher acceptance, participation in Capital Quality, and Capital Quality designation.

Findings suggest that though the overall supply of home-based child care in DC has nearly recovered from the pandemic, more support for home-based options with a diversity of characteristics could help maintain and grow a child care supply that can better serve all families living in DC.

In a companion brief, we present findings on trends in the licensed center-based child care supply. We also show results across centers and homes in an Urban Wire blog post. The DC Child Care Policy Research Partnership will continue tracking trends in the supply of child care across the District over the coming years.