How much does daycare cost in your area?

Ours would be a little less, but less than $200 a week is a miracle.

You might find this helpful for comparisons. Through friends I’ve heard rates for our area at $1400—$2600+/month – I couldn’t say exactly what that buys though.

[self edit. don’t know what I’m talking about.]

Holy crap that’s expesive.

Around here there’s a guy in a white van that will watch your kids for the day, he even gives them candy.

Yes. That’s totally normal. Many moms stay at home because their job would pay for daycare, but wouldn’t go to making the family better off.

My sister paid about the same for Corey’s daycare. She was working for Symantec at the time and about 60% of her income went to childcare while she was at work.

Symantec makes shitty software but actually treats employes well. After a lot of bitching they opened up a free daycare center in the building everyone worked at. Saved my sis tons of cash and she could take the elevator to spend her lunch with her kid.

Symantec still writes shitty software.

Sounds like a decent price to me, especially if it is one of the premier day care centers in town. I just checked the prices for the place where my kids went. For 5 days a week, infants cost $1530; toddlers cost $1376 and preschool only costs $1123. Prices obviously vary according to number of days of week and age.

As I recall, the prices pretty well dove-tailed with what kindergarten cost. Every year, you pay more. If you have private school all the way through college, college will seem like pretty much more of the same. Maybe even less, if your child gets into a school that pays a lot of the way for the students. Like Harvard. Harvard apparently has a big sticker price, but the oot of pocket cost is much less.

About £400 a week or £20,800 a year or, to put another way, probably more than the average wage in the first place. (Mind you I live in central London).

@wundayatta, I don’t know if it’s “premiere,” it’s just the one provided and subsidized by the university.

Minimum full day care is $250 a week. The professional day care centers such as KinderCare are considerably more than that.

It’s lower than in my area @nikipedia. For this reason, a lot of families are choosing to enroll their 3yr olds into private and parochial schools with before and after school care.

The cost of private schools here range from $2k to $13k per year. As far as I know the average range of daycare here is $1400 to about $2500 per month.

I pay $85 per day for preschool. I can only afford 3 days a week.

I pay $60 a day for the babysitter (all day when I’m at work).I do that one day a week.

Infants cost around $200—$230/week and the costs go down a bit for toddlers.

When my daughter was born, I looked into a day care center for her for when I returned to work – she would have been 7 mos old. For that age, it was $650 for two weeks, for full time. That was more than I could afford, which was why I went with the babysitter, at $50 per day = $250 a week. When my daughter turned 3 I put her in preschool, because I felt like she needed more stimulation, and we kept the babysitter 2 days a week (to save money).