The data is damning. All but a single county in Maine lost licensed child care providers between 2018 and 2025. And the bills moving through Augusta this session don’t fix it.
Not just Portland. Not just Lewiston. Aroostook County. Washington County. Somerset. Piscataquis. The places already struggling the most to hold onto working families lost the providers those families depended on. This is a statewide collapse happening in slow motion that’s been building for years.
Right now, 18,000 working-age Mainers are out of the labor force because they can’t find or afford child care. Infant care costs $15,444 a year on average statewide ‒ more than in-state college tuition, and a number that has risen nearly 30% since 2021.
For families in Portland or Lewiston, actual provider rates run closer to $27,000 to $33,000 annually. This is a genuine crisis. The people raising alarm about it are right to do so. The question is whether Augusta’s response matches the actual diagnosis.
Where the Status Quo Falls Short
Senate President Daughtry spent nearly four months last summer on a listening tour visiting 11 child care programs across six counties. She launched a public survey. She brought Governor Mills along for stops. She told Maine Public the tour would inform new legislation she planned to bring to committee in January.
What came out of it was the same playbook Augusta has been running for years: throwing more money at the problem. Not a single proposal to reduce the regulatory barriers that providers told her were driving them out of business. Not a single idea to make it easier to open a family child care home. Not a single reform to the licensing framework that makes small-scale, community-based care nearly impossible in rural Maine.
Ultimately, they spent four months traveling the state just to come back and do the same thing they do every session. Though well-intentioned, their plan has three structural weaknesses that deserve honest attention.
First, it is almost entirely demand-side. The bills come with a combined fiscal impact exceeding $20 million annually. Not one creates a new licensed child care slot. In the counties with the steepest provider losses, where “child care deserts” are most acute, the binding constraint is not that families lack subsidies. It is that there is no provider to subsidize. When a community loses half of its licensed providers, a new reimbursement structure does not bring them back.
Second, clearing the waitlist today does not solve the problem tomorrow. The Child Care Affordability Program (CCAP), a state program to subsidize care for low-income families, currently reaches about 7% of eligible families ‒ a strikingly low participation rate that reflects not just the waitlist but discouragement, lack of awareness, and administrative complexity. Clearing the waitlist, as LD 1955 attempts, without keeping the funding going and without a parallel expansion of options in the market, will guarantee the waitlist will come back. Throwing money at a program will simply not fix the problem.
Third, some of the bills rest on weak evidence. The employer tax credit (LD 1555) offers businesses a refundable credit covering 50% of child care costs they provide for employees. The comparable federal credit has existed for years and was only claimed by about 3% of businesses annually, out of tens of thousands of eligible filers. The reasons are straightforward: high startup costs the credit doesn’t offset, difficulty projecting employee enrollment, and an administrative burden that falls hardest on exactly the small businesses the bill is designed to help.
This is why Congress expanded this credit last summer. Maine would be entering a policy space with historically near-zero uptake at the same moment the federal government just dramatically expanded its own credit. The more prudent move would be to see how the federal expansion plays out and revisit this idea next year.
The $350+ Million Question
Democratic governor candidate Troy Jackson wants to go a lot further. His “Childcare for All” plan would provide free care for families earning up to 125% of state median income
(roughly $145,000 for a family of four) and cap costs at 7% of income for everyone else. His campaign estimates the price tag at $350 million in new annual state spending.
For context: Maine currently receives $33.7 million in federal child care funds annually. The proposed $15 million CCAP appropriation would bring combined program funding to roughly $49 million. Jackson wants to multiply that by seven.
The proposed funding mechanism would be a tax on income above $1 million. There is also talk of drawing from the budget stabilization fund, the state’s emergency savings account. Using this account ‒ which exists to smooth revenue shocks during recessions ‒ to finance permanent program expansions is a far cry from fiscal prudence.
The more fundamental problem with the Jackson plan is the same one that haunts the entire Democratic package, just at a larger scale. My back-of-envelope estimate, based on Maine birth rates and current infant care market rates, puts the cost of a universal “first year free” benefit ‒ one of Jackson’s four planks ‒ at somewhere between $80 million and $180 million per year, depending on participation rates. And that does not account for the supply-side expansions needed for infant slots to actually deliver the benefit.
Maine’s infant care waitlist is already the most acute in the system: over 78% of children on existing waitlists are infants. Making infant care free without a massive parallel capacity expansion would simply generate a longer line for the same number of slots.
More money chasing the same supply does not lower prices. It raises them.
The Conversation Augusta Isn’t Having
Maine has never systematically asked which child care regulations protect children and which ones are driving providers out of the market. No governor has ordered that audit. No committee has undertaken it.
When many House Republicans voted against these bills, Rep. Laurel Libby clearly stated why: Maine’s child care crisis is fundamentally a supply problem driven by excessive bureaucracy. Licensing rules, staff-to-child ratio requirements, and facility standards make it genuinely difficult and expensive to open or sustain a child care business, especially in small communities and rural areas. Her prescription: reduce regulatory barriers, encourage employer-sponsored and community-based models, and let more providers enter the market at lower cost.
This is the conversation Augusta is not having, and it deserves to be had seriously.
Some requirements, like staff background checks and basic safety standards, are reasonable, while others seem to reflect credentialing orthodoxy more than child safety outcomes. A 2011 analysis in the journal American Economics Review found that state child care regulations reduce the number of providers, especially in lower income markets. The tradeoff between access and quality is real. But Maine has never done that audit. No one has systematically asked which regulations are driving providers out of the market.
What Fixing This Crisis Looks Like
Expanding supply requires making it easier to open and operate licensed child care businesses, period. We need providers that can serve rural communities without requiring commercial real estate or large capital investment. Demand-side dollars cannot flow to providers that don’t exist. Supply has to come first.
Family empowerment means giving families more control in how they choose their child care arrangements by trusting them to find the right provider for their needs, whether licensed or license-exempt, center-based or home-based.
Price and cost stabilization means directly reducing the cost of providing care, not just the cost of purchasing it. This comes from competition: when families have choices, providers have a genuine incentive to offer the best quality and price. In a market with too few providers and too few slots, more subsidy dollars without more capacity simply means higher prices. Maine needs more motivated child care entrepreneurs to step up and serve their neighbors, but that doesn’t happen without potential profit.
Achieving Lasting Reform
Maine families are not well served by a debate framed as a choice between $15 million or $350 of their tax dollars funneled to state programs. They are not well served by a package of bills that pays lip service to the crisis without treating the cause. And they are not well served by a political conversation that treats every spending proposal as economic stimulus and every regulatory critique as indifference to struggling parents.
Instead, let’s expand supply by making it easier and cheaper to open and operate licensed child care businesses. Let’s empower families with more control in how they choose their child care arrangements. And let’s stimulate competition.
Where families have choices, providers have a genuine incentive to offer the best quality and price. This is the way out of Maine’s child care crisis.
The map at the top of this article tells the real story. Providers have been leaving Maine for years. Until Augusta is willing to honestly ask why, no amount of subsidy funding will bring them back.
Nick Murray is Policy & Communications Director with Lead Maine.
Download the Lead Maine Child Care Crisis onepager here: