Childcare Availability in Florida

Who and what we counted

The licensed supply includes Operational Florida providers whose license status is not Exempt: child care facilities, family childcare homes and large family childcare homes. It contains 8,852 locations and 776,268 reported spots. The centers-only comparison contains 6,585 locations and 753,998 spots. Providers without usable coordinates or positive capacity are excluded from the geographic model; providers with no child population nearby cannot contribute any spots at that distance.

Population is the sum of the male and female under-five estimates in Census table B01001. Official 2024 Gazetteer internal points represent census tracts and Census places. A tract’s effective radius is the radius of a circle with the same land area. The reliably measured five-mile distribution covers 97.209% of Florida’s children under 5. It includes 4,685 tracts whose effective radius is no greater than five miles, home to 1,094,907 children under 5. County figures average tract estimates, weighted by the number of young children. City and community figures share capacity separately among Census place residents.

Distance, weighting and uncertainty

The study checks 2-, 5- and 10-mile radii. The primary distance weights are 1 through 2 miles, 0.6 through 5 miles, 0.25 through 10 miles, applied as successive distance bands and cut off at the radius of each run. We also tested equal weights at every distance and weights that drop more steeply to see how much these choices affect the results. We measure straight-line distance along the Earth’s surface, without accounting for roads, bridges, traffic, transit or water.

All families in an area are represented by one point, so the model cannot see differences within it. A county is marked “Limited by area size” if more than 50% of its young children live in tracts whose effective radius exceeds the distance measured. When every child does, or no children are estimated, the figure is “Not reliably measured.” An unavailable estimate is never treated as zero. Headline counts and percentiles exclude oversized tracts.

Census population estimates have sampling error, which is not included in these calculations. The provider database records and population estimates refer to different periods. Families and providers outside Florida are not counted. Near Alabama and Georgia, leaving out children across the border can overstate how much capacity Florida providers have per child. The study identifies border areas using an approximate straight-line boundary, not an official boundary file.

Reading the numbers

Percentiles are weighted by children under 5, not by the number of neighborhoods. The gap compares the unrounded 90th percentile, 105.8522, with the 10th percentile, 27.709, and rounds the result of dividing them to one decimal: 3.8.

The homes calculation subtracts centers from all licensed locations (8,852 minus 6,585) and from reported capacity (776,268 minus 753,998). Each remainder is divided by the corresponding all-licensed total and multiplied by 100. Shares are rounded to one decimal, with halves rounded up. Both shares use the provider totals counted for this study.

The borrowed threshold is 3 or more children per spot, equivalent to 33.3333 licensed spots or fewer per 100 children, with that decimal rounded for reading. Areas with no licensed spot also count. The formal childcare desert definition instead uses strictly more than the threshold, requires at least 50 children, and assesses supply within an administrative boundary. This study makes no formal desert determination.

Area values use the study’s published display precision. Spoken ratios in the opening are approximate: different values can share the same short ratio. Use the numerical values for comparisons. Sources below provide the official records; the derived study tables are not currently offered as a public download.