New Data Dashboard Provides a Clear Picture of Childcare Availability in the Fredericksburg Area
Demand considerably outpaces supply.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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In the Fredericksburg area, there are 14,961 children under the age of 5 who come from families where all available parents are in the workforce—but there is only enough year-round childcare available for a little over half of them.
That’s according to data available at a public dashboard created by the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation and launched in the fall. It provides the most current information on the demand for childcare in the state, pulling together data from the Census Bureau, the five-year and one-year American Community Surveys, and state education and social services departments.
There are 71 year-round early childhood care and education programs in Planning District 16, which includes Fredericksburg City and the counties of Stafford, Spotsylvania, Caroline, and King George. According to a map of locations, most programs are clustered around Fredericksburg City, with a handful also in north Stafford.
There are six programs in Caroline, all in the western part of the county, and five in King George—three along Route 3, one near Dahlgren, and one on U.S. 301 in the southern part of the county.
Stafford County has the most children under age 5 with all parents in the workforce—6,451. That’s followed by Spotsylvania, with 5,131; Caroline, with 1,230; Fredericksburg, with 1,075; and King George, with 1,074.
The dashboard also has information about the cost of childcare. The median annual rate of care for an infant in the Fredericksburg area in 2023 was $16,380; for a toddler, $14,924; for a preschooler, $13,780; and for a school-aged child, $13,000.
Early childhood care is considered to be affordable if it is 7% or less of a family’s income. The median rates from 2023 are only considered affordable if a family makes between $185,714 and $234,000 annually—yet in Virginia, the median income is about $81,000 and in the Fredericksburg area, about 60% of families with children aged 5 and under make less than that.
These families generally qualify for publicly funded early childhood education programs, such as Head Start, Early Head Start, the Virginia Preschool Initiative, and the Child Care Subsidy Program.
However, in 2024, there were only enough availability in publicly funded childcare programs to serve 18.9% of income-eligible children, according to the dashboard.
The number of available slots did increase between 2023 and 2024, going from 2,100 to 2,620.
The dashboard also includes information about women’s participation in the workforce, which is often related to childcare availability and affordability.
Statewide, 71.2% percent of women aged 20 to 64 with children under age 6 were working, compared to 64.5% in the Fredericksburg area. And the percent of local women in the workforce dropped between 2017 and 2022 from 65.7% to 64.5%, though it rose statewide from 69.2 to 71%.
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