The 2026 Texas Child Care Cost of Quality Price Modeling Final Report examines the incremental costs of providing higher-quality home-based child care in Texas. Researchers from the Ray Marshall Center at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing conducted this study on behalf of the Texas Workforce Commission as part of an annual project.
The report estimates the cost of providing Texas Rising Star certified care in licensed and registered child care homes, compared with similar homes that meet state licensing standards but are not Texas Rising Star certified. Using survey data from home-based providers and publicly available data sources, the study models the prices charged for care and explores how structural quality factors such as staffing, education and experience, training, compensation, curriculum, assessment, and planning time contribute to the cost of quality care.
Findings show that prices charged for care of children in Four-Star certified homes were typically about 9 to 15 percent higher than care at comparable non-certified homes, while there was no statistically significant pricing effect among Two-Star and Three-Star certified homes. The report also finds that nearly all Texas Rising Star-certified homes reported using a curriculum and assessing children, with the use of formal child assessments increasing substantially since the 2021 study. Taken together, these findings suggest the Texas Rising Star program is both making quality levers more available to providers, while also to some extent shielding them from the costs of these quality upgrades.
2026 Texas Child Care Cost of Quality Price Modeling Final Report: Homes