Danielle Kildahl-Brooks and her husband had a system. With one child, they only needed help one day a week; a family member could cover it.
Then their second child was born, and things got a lot harder.
“He had some medical things, and the job I was at before having him couldn’t hold my place while I was trying to take care of him,” Kildahl-Brooks said. “That put me out of a job.”
Without work, she couldn’t afford childcare. Without childcare, she couldn’t take a new job.
“It all boiled down to: I couldn’t find a job because I couldn’t get childcare,” she said. “And that was one of the biggest reasons why we couldn’t afford rent.”
The family was evicted from their home in Fort Collins in the fall of 2025.
Kildahl-Brooks’ story is not unusual in Colorado, where childcare costs, housing prices and stagnant wages have collided into a crisis that’s pushing families out of the state or out of the decision to have children at all.
Affordability challenges are compounded by a freeze on the state’s main childcare subsidy program, making things far worse for families and providers.
It costs $28,922 a year to raise a child in Colorado, the 10th-highest price tag in the country, according to an annual LendingTree study. For many families, that cost alone is enough to push them into poverty. Unaffordable housing, food and childcare compound, trapping families in cycles like the one that cost Kildahl-Brooks her home.
Nowhere is that bind more visible than in childcare. Families across the state are caught in an impossible situation, unable to work without care, and unable to afford care without work, while a patchwork of state and local funding programs attempt to provide support.
The childcare-employment dependency
Kildahl-Brooks, her husband and their two children, ages 2 and 5, eventually pieced things together to find a new place to live in Fort Collins.
After months of searching, Kildahl-Brooks found a job, and they secured childcare with help from , a nonprofit in northern Colorado that supports families facing homelessness, poverty and housing instability.
But affording that care remains a month-to-month struggle. The family qualifies for the , the state’s primary subsidy for low-income families, but can’t access it. Larimer County froze new enrollments in February 2024, when pandemic-era federal funding ran out.
Instead, the childcare center offered them a discounted rate of $200 a week, nearly a third of their household income. They’re covering the cost with temporary support from a program that helps military veterans and their families with rent and daycare costs. That support runs out next month, leaving them to find another solution to pay for the care that lets them keep working.
Kildahl-Brooks worries about what that instability means for her kids.
“As much as my husband and I try to shield our kids from it, it’s going to affect them,” she said. “Poverty is horrible on kids. It robs them of a wonderful childhood.”
Interconnected crises create instability
Affordability pressures are interconnected. Addressing one crisis, like housing, without considering its ripple effects on childcare, which influences workforce participation, misses the full picture of the economic vulnerability that people face. Traditional measures of poverty also miss the full scope of who is impacted.
When policymakers consider how many people need support, they rely on the . According to this measure, Colorado’s official poverty rate is 9.6%. That rate is slightly higher in Larimer County, where 10.5% of residents are experiencing poverty, while Weld County matches the state average.
Yet according to alternative measures of poverty like the , the statewide share of households whose income is insufficient to meet basic needs rose from 24.9% in 2022 to 26.8% in 2024.
The Self Sufficiency Standard calculates the income a working family needs to cover the basics such as housing, childcare, food, healthcare, transportation and taxes, without public or private assistance. Itap maintained by the and distributed by the . The measure offers an alternative to the federal poverty measure, which many criticize for being outdated.
The 2024 Self Sufficiency Standard report will be released this fall. Charles Brennan, the director of income and housing policy at the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, noted a particular concern around childcare.
“Comparing 2022 to 2001,” he said, “childcare costs were among the fastest-growing expenses over the period and likely continues to be a major driver of cost increases.”
While there has been a focus on the increased cost of living and inflation occurring post-pandemic, Brennan said Colorado had affordability issues long before COVID-19. “Really, we were seeing the cost of living increase faster than wages throughout the 2000s and 2010s.”
Cost pressures extend to providers
As the state’s budget tightens and public funds for childcare support are frozen, 14,000 children who qualify for the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program and are eligible to receive childcare subsidies can’t get them.
New enrollments are frozen across 25 counties in Colorado, including Larimer and Weld, due to funding issues. This doesn’t just impact families, but also the providers who rely on the funding to offer care for children whose families can’t afford the true cost.
State Sen. Scott Bright, a Platteville Republican, runs , a multi-site childcare center in Greeley and surrounding areas. The business was started by his grandmother in the 1960s; he bought the company from his mom about 10 years ago.
Since the Child Care Assistance Program freeze, Bright has become increasingly worried about his business and ability to keep the doors open.
“Our challenge is we don’t have new families stepping in our front door unless they’re transferring from another center,” he said. “So that’s what’s causing us to go from 90% (occupied) down to 50%.”
In addition to strain caused by fewer families with Child Care Assistance Program funding, providers also experience the pressure of operating cost increases, which Bright said is mostly labor, “as the total cost pushes the cost of childcare to families, it just has become increasingly unaffordable.”
Solutions are being proposed across the state and in northern Colorado, but Bright said they fall short.
“The state doesn’t have the budget to prop (the industry) up, and it’s way too big of an issue for the counties to carry on their own,” he said. “We’re in a situation right now where there aren’t solutions unless they come from some new idea, new source.”
Bright proposed one of these new ideas in the 2026 legislative session. was inspired by the universal childcare program in New Mexico that uses surplus oil and natural gas severance taxes to fund childcare.
“If the government has funds in the treasury that are not immediately needed within the next six to 12 months, can we reinvest those funds, get a little bit higher rate of return and use that to help fund low-income childcare?” he said.
The bill didn’t pass, but Bright intends to introduce a similar bill in the 2027 session.
Regional funding fills some gaps
Regional funding in areas of Larimer County provides some support for local families.
Estes Park is one of the first cities in the state to use lodging taxes to address affordability issues in their community. After residents voted yes on the 6E ballot initiative in 2022, the was established to provide tuition assistance to families. The city raised the lodging tax from 2% to 5.5%, and the extra 3.5% is dedicated to subsidies for both housing and childcare.
The program launched in 2023. Carlie Speedlin, the housing and childcare manager for the town of Estes Park, said that much of the childcare funding has gone to tuition assistance to fill the gap created by the freeze of the state’s assistance program. The funding also provides middle-income tuition so households aren’t paying more than 10% of their income on childcare and supports licensed childcare providers with annual grants that cover operating costs.
Even with a holistic program like the one in Estes, Speedlin said affordability challenges still plague the industry in the area.
“We lost a lot of families during COVID … and then real estate exponentially increased,” she said. As a result, the community is seeing lower enrollment at schools, including childcare centers.
Speedlin is taking the current challenges of enrollment and population seriously, but she’s taking a long view. The 6E funds have contributed to the development of 109 workforce housing units. Speedlin hopes this will put the town in a proactive position to help future families.
“We don’t have a 300-kid waitlist right now, but we still need to be investing in things,” Speedlin said.
In broader Larimer County, a 2025 ballot initiative established a new 0.25% sales and use tax increase that will go into the Kids Thrive Fund, administered by , a nonprofit organization that provides support and resources to childcare providers and families.
The Kids Thrive Fund will give financial support to families to cover care, increase workforce compensation and improve childcare facilities. Families will be able to apply for support in early 2027, but the money will only go so far.
The initiative was expected to create $28 million in annual funding for Larimer County families — below the estimated $40 million to $60 million required to make childcare free for the county’s 18,000 children aged 5 and under.
Julie Malmberg Grawe, the chief impact officer at Northern Colorado Kids Thrive, said the tax will bring in just close to $20 million in its first year because spending has come in below projections.
With the funding they have, Malmberg Grawe estimates about 1,000 families will be supported. The financial assistance will be distributed so the families with the most need will receive the most support and applications will be processed in the order they are received.
“Long story short, that money, it’s going to run out,” Malmberg Grawe said. “There’s an incentive to get your application in sooner because it is first-come, first-served.”
Univesral preschool only covers a small portion
The program provides 4-year-olds with up to 15 hours per week of tuition-free preschool. The state spends roughly $349 million annually to fund universal preschool, which only covers about a third of a standard work week, and only for the single year before kindergarten.
Colorado had 380,794 children aged 5 and under in 2024, according to , a census by the , a nonprofit advocacy and research organization. Center-based childcare in the state costs an average of $20,978 a year, according to data from the — meaning universal care for all children 5 and under would cost the state nearly $8 billion, far more than current funding sources provide.
While there are initiatives on the 2026 ballot that could provide more funding in some communities, the costs will still exceed what any of the current or proposed future programs could cover altogether.
These include the , a proposed 2.579-mill property tax increase to support childcare costs in the area, and a statewide , which would raise Colorado’s flat 4.4% income tax rate for individuals and businesses earning more than $500,000 annually. If passed, that measure would raise $2 billion a year for child care, healthcare, and K-12 education.
Additionally, will be on the ballot, which asks voters whether to raise the cap, letting Colorado keep an extra $4.6 billion for K-12 education, childcare and school readiness across the state.
Current programs might stop the bleeding caused by the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program freeze, but they cannot fix the issue of how expensive it is to have a family in Colorado.
For now, families like the Kildahl-Brookss are left navigating a system of expiring grants, frozen subsidies and first-come, first-served funds, a patchwork built to manage a crisis, not solve it.
What that patchwork looks like in practice, for the families living inside it, is a narrowing set of options. Bright, the state senator and owner of a childcare facility, has watched that narrowing happen firsthand as enrollment freezes push families out of programs and centers out of business.
“Zero choices is not a choice. One choice is not really a choice,” Bright said. “They have to take whatever is there and that’s not a fun thing for a parent.”
