Raising a child to age 18 in the United States now costs somewhere above $300,000 for a middle-income family, and the largest line items, childcare, housing, and health coverage, have all grown faster than household income. Every figure in this roundup carries its source in the sentence, so you can check each one and see which are current, which are older, and which are estimates built on other estimates.

The headline number

The most cited figure comes from the Brookings Institution, which took the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s last full estimate of child-rearing expenditures and adjusted it for inflation. The result is a total commonly cited near $300,000 or more to raise a child born in the early 2020s to age 18, for a married, middle-income couple. That excludes college. It is a modeled number, not a survey, and it depends on assumptions about inflation and family size, so treat it as a scale marker rather than a bill.

Childcare

Child Care Aware of America calculated a national average price of child care of $13,128 for 2024. Center-based care commonly runs between $10,000 and $17,000 or more per child per year depending on the state and the child’s age, with infant care at the top of the range.

The same Child Care Aware analysis found that in 41 states plus the District of Columbia, a year of center-based infant care cost more than a year of in-state public university tuition. It found the national average price would take 10 percent of a married couple’s median income and 35 percent of a single parent’s, against the 7 percent of income that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set as the co-payment ceiling for subsidized families in its 2024 child care rule (a mandatory cap HHS rescinded effective July 2026, leaving the limit to each state). And it put the five-year increase in child care prices from 2020 to 2024 at 29 percent, against a 22 percent rise in overall consumer prices as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics over the same period.

For a family with two children in care for the roughly five years before kindergarten, the childcare line alone can pass $100,000 at national average prices. That single category explains much of the gap between older cost-of-raising-a-child estimates and current ones.

Health coverage

KFF’s 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey put the average annual premium for family coverage at about $25,000, with the worker’s share above $6,000. The employer pays the remainder. A family that adds a child to a plan moves from individual to family coverage, and the worker’s share of that jump is a recurring cost for every year of childhood.

On the debt side, a KFF analysis of Census Survey of Income and Program Participation data, published in 2022 and reflecting 2021, found at least $220 billion in medical debt outstanding nationally, and a KFF and NPR investigation the same year estimated roughly 100 million adults carry some form of health care debt. Those are 2021 to 2022 figures and are the most recent comprehensive ones available.

Housing

The National Association of Realtors and the Census Bureau put the median U.S. home sale price roughly between $400,000 and $420,000 in 2024. Against the Census Bureau’s median household income of about $80,000 as of 2023, a home costs about five times annual income. In the 1980s the ratio was about three. Families with children need more bedrooms than families without, so the housing premium for raising a child shows up as a larger house, a longer commute, or both.

Food

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service tracks grocery prices through the food-at-home Consumer Price Index. Food-at-home prices rose 3.5 percent in 2020, 11.4 percent in 2022 (the fastest year since 1979 for food overall), 5.0 percent in 2023, 1.2 percent in 2024, and 2.3 percent in 2025, according to the ERS Food Price Outlook. The historical average is 2.6 percent a year. Compounding those five years alone puts a grocery basket roughly a quarter higher than before the pandemic, and more once 2021 is included, and families with growing children buy more of it every year.

Income, the denominator

The Census Bureau reports median household income at about $80,000 as of 2023. Half of households earn less. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and has not changed since 2009, per the U.S. Department of Labor; a full-time year at that rate pays $15,080.

Cost figures only mean something against income, and the childcare numbers make the point sharpest. At the Census median, the national average price of care for one child is about 16 percent of gross household income. At the federal minimum, it is 87 percent of one full-time earner’s pay.

Workforce effects

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2024, 68.3 percent of mothers with children under 6 were in the labor force, compared with 78.0 percent of mothers whose youngest child was 6 to 17. The roughly ten-point gap lines up with the years when care is most expensive. A parent who leaves the workforce during those years forgoes income that does not appear in any cost-of-raising-a-child estimate, and that forgone income is often the largest cost of all.

The college line, for completeness

The $300,000 figure stops at 18. For families that continue, the Education Data Initiative puts average student loan debt near $38,000 per borrower, and the Federal Reserve’s G.19 consumer credit release tracks total outstanding student loans in the range of $1.7 trillion. Whether the parent or the child carries that debt, it is part of the cost of raising a child to independence.

What the numbers add up to

Take the Brookings-adjusted USDA figure as the base. Add five years of care for one child at the Child Care Aware national average, roughly $65,000. Add the worker share of family health premiums over 18 years at the KFF 2024 rate, roughly $110,000 if premiums stayed flat, which they have not. The cost of raising a child is not one number; it is a stack of category costs, each with its own source, and the two categories growing fastest are the two that hit families earliest.

Organizations working on affordability draw the same conclusion from the same sources. Fight For A Living Wage, a nonpartisan grassroots 501(c)(3), frames the problem as an affordability crisis across housing, healthcare, childcare, food, and education, rather than as a question of the minimum wage alone. The figures above are the ones that framing rests on, and all of them are public.