The 2025 Texas Child Care Cost of Quality Price Modeling report explores the incremental costs of providing quality child care in the State of Texas.
Researchers at the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing conducted the report in collaboration with the Ray Marshall Center. Each year, the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) contracts the survey as part of an annual project.
The 2025 study explores the incremental costs of providing quality child care in licensed centers across Texas, compared to care that meets only basic state licensing standards (quality costs for child care homes are studied in even-numbered years). It does this in part by analyzing and modeling the prices charged by nationally accredited and Texas Rising Star certified providers, compared to similar non-accredited and non-certified centers. In addition to estimating the overall cost of quality care, the study examines how individual structural components of quality contribute to those costs.
Researchers surveyed a sample of center-based child care facilities to capture key quality factors and pricing information. They supplemented these findings with publicly available data to build statistical models of quality care pricing.
A stable teacher-child relationship remains key to quality care. In 2025, accredited and Four-Star centers stood out for employing fewer part-time staff, offering better compensation and benefits, and having more educated and credentialed staff. Child-teacher ratios continued to show little link to pricing, while geographic location and staff wages played major roles. Use of formal curricula and assessments was more common in high-quality centers, reinforcing consistent patterns seen in previous years.
2025 Texas Child Care Cost of Quality Price Modeling Report: Centers
