ISSUE 004
Recreation counties are growing five times faster than the rest of Missouri
Three entries in this pillar have now arrived at the same place from different directions: Missouri grows only by attracting working-age people, and whether they can work once they arrive is a separate question. This is about the constraint that keeps turning up underneath the employment numbers, with a price tag attached by the university rather than by an advocacy group.
An idea worth thinking about
Split the bill three ways and it stops being a benefits problem
Missouri Child Care Works is a Tri-Share programme: the cost of care is divided between the employer, the employee and the state, with eligible families generally falling between 150 and 555 percent of the federal poverty level — well above the cut-off for traditional subsidy, which is the point. It reaches working families who earn too much for assistance and not enough for the actual price.
An analysis of the model identified what makes it workable for small employers specifically: employer costs are predictable rather than open-ended, administration is centralised so a six-person business isn't running a benefits programme, payments to providers are consolidated, and participation is flexible enough for rural employers with a handful of staff.
The reframe underneath it is the useful part. The report concludes these programmes work best understood as workforce and economic development tools rather than social services. That is not a rhetorical move — it changes who is supposed to act. If child care is welfare, it's the state's problem and you wait. If it's workforce infrastructure, it sits alongside broadband and roads, and employers have standing to do something about it.
Read the policy analysis
A tool I disappeared into
The university's free report you can hand to a county commission
MU Extension, with the MU Center for Family Policy and Research, published The Economic Impact of Child Care Shortages in Missouri as a free download, and the University of Missouri runs an employer-facing side of it aimed at businesses trying to do something locally rather than wait for policy.
What makes the report useful beyond reading it is that it's a citable document from a land-grant university with dollar figures attached, which is a different object from an advocacy brief when you're sitting in front of a county commission or a bank. MU Extension specialist Luke Dietterle framed the purpose exactly that way — that tangible data points help communities understand and communicate what businesses are facing.
Pair it with the Missouri Economy Indicators brief from the same programme, which carries the supply ratio and the cost figures. Between them you can assemble a one-page case for your own county without commissioning anything.
Download the report
Learn something
A hundred-page account of how the supply actually collapsed
The Missouri Association for the Education of Young Children published a landscape report in January 2025 that is the most complete picture of the sector I've found, and it's a free PDF. It covers capacity, geography, workforce, and the funding cliff in enough detail to be genuinely explanatory rather than hortatory.
The mechanism worth understanding is the ARPA cliff. Federal pandemic relief propped up provider finances; when that funding expired in 2023, the report documents over 80 programme closures, tuition increases and reduced capacity following. This is why the sector's problem is not simply that fewer people want the work — the economics of running a small centre stopped closing when a temporary subsidy ended.
It also makes a point that complicates the geography: capacity growth has not consistently reached the areas with the highest need. Progress in reducing the number of deserts statewide can coexist with 78 counties still facing significant shortages, because the new capacity appears where it is commercially viable, which is not where the gap is worst.
Read the landscape report
What we’re seeing
$951 million in absenteeism and turnover. $194 million in lost tax revenue. $1.15 billion a year.
MU Extension and the MU Center for Family Policy and Research put the annual cost of Missouri's child care access problem at roughly $1.15 billion, and the breakdown is what makes it usable: $951 million in employer costs from worker absenteeism and turnover, and $194 million in lost tax revenue. This is money leaving businesses, not a hypothetical social cost.
The supply ratio underneath it is stark. MU Extension's Missouri Economy Indicators brief finds that for every ten children under age five, there are only 4.6 available child care slots. A separate report identifies 112 of Missouri's 115 county equivalents as child care deserts specifically for infants and toddlers, while the MOAEYC landscape report counts 78 counties with significant shortages on a broader definition. Different thresholds, different age bands, same direction.
On price, two credible sources disagree and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. MU Extension puts average annual full-time care at $8,100, roughly 14 percent of a typical Missouri family's income. The First Five Years Fund puts the average at $13,780 a year, or $1,148 a month. That is a $5,680 gap between two organisations with no reason to mislead, and it almost certainly reflects definitional differences — which ages, which care settings, which year. Worth knowing before you quote either at a meeting.
The direction of travel is genuinely mixed, which the advocacy framing tends to flatten. Missouri lost 81 registered child care facilities between January 2024 and January 2025. Over the same general period, child care sector employment in 2024 stood 4 percent above 2020 levels and nearly half of Missouri counties reported increased capacity in 2025. Facilities closing while employment and capacity rise suggests consolidation into larger centres, which helps a town with one and does nothing for a county with none.
For an employer the operative number is the first one. Absenteeism and turnover are line items you already pay, and this research says a measurable share of them trace to something happening at 7am that has nothing to do with your business and everything to do with whether your county has slots.
MU Extension and MU Center for Family Policy and Research
One question
Have you lost an employee over child care?
Or nearly. Reply with roughly what happened — the $951 million figure is an aggregate of exactly these stories and I'd like to hear some of them.
More in this pillar as it's written.
— Shana
Sources link to the original publisher, never to a summary.