Free guaranteeing a place in childcare services to all children in New York, from six weeks to five years, could cost between 8.7 and 9.5 billion dollars a year. The estimate is contained in a new model developed by the Center for New York City Affairs of the New School and is significantly higher than the 6 billion indicated by Zohran Mamdani during the election campaign. In order to implement the program in its more extended form, it would therefore take approximately 5.5 billion dollars more than the city spends today to provide these services directly.
The calculation is not a definitive estimate and depends on how many families would actually choose to use the service. The model considers two scenarios: the one with the highest participation brings the cost to 9,3 billion, while a question closer to the current use of Pre-K, 3-K and public vouchers reduces it to about 8.7 billion. The estimate does not include any initial expenses to build or restructure the structures. The real cost could therefore decrease with less grips or increase if it was necessary to create new spaces.
The difference with respect to the 6 billion provided by Mamdani depends above all on what would be paid for the people dealing with children. The model does not simply use the rates practised today, often determined by how much families can spend, but tries to calculate how much it really serves to cover salaries, contributions, support staff and management expenses. According to the report, about 68 cents of each dollar spent by a childhood center serve to pay wages and benefits.
It is an important distinction, because the sector has been working for years thanks to very low compensation. Household services, i.e. small programs managed in private homes, have relatively high costs due to the mandatory relationship between adults and children, but often leave to managers minimum earnings. Using current rates as a starting point would allow you to present a less expensive program, but continuing to pay little who should support its expansion.
The availability of buildings seems to be a less big problem than you might think. According to the report, about 10,500 additional places would be needed to reach universal coverage, distributed in just under 1,200 new programs. Many authorized domicile centers and services have already unused places and could absorb a considerable part of the demand. For this reason, at least in the first phase, researchers do not consider the construction of a large number of new structures necessary.
The main limit is staff. Today the sector employs about 50,300 people among educators, employees of centers and managers of home programs. A universal system would require almost 74 thousand. New York should therefore hire about 23,600 workers, largely intended for children under three years, for which smaller groups are expected and a greater number of adults present.
Current expenditure is also difficult to quantify precisely, because it is divided between public schools, partner centers, programs managed in private homes and vouchers for families with lower incomes. In 2025 the city had allocated approximately $2.45 billion for direct service delivery, but at the end of the year it had spent 3.82. Considering administrative expenditure, the total had reached at least 4.86 billion. The same report warns that the figure could be substimated, because some items of the school budget do not allow to accurately separate child spending from those for the rest of the educational system.
The distance between what had been foreseen and what has actually been spent shows one of the risks of the new program: starting from a figure too low and covering the difference later, leaving managers with insufficient contracts. The Center for New York City Affairs calculates that, considering the 3.82 billion already spent on the provision of services, the city has reached about 40 percent of the resources needed for a universal system. They’d miss 5.5 billion every year.
It is a sum equivalent to more than 4 percent of the entire city budget, which for the fiscal year 2027 amounts to 125.8 billion dollars. The comparison does not mean that the programme would take up that share of the budget alone, because part of the expenditure is already financed. However, it indicates the size of the new revenue needed to transform existing programmes into a service available to all, without income limits.
The project began for now on a much smaller scale. In the fall of 2026 there will be 2,000 free places for two-year-olds in some school districts of Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. The state has allocated 73 million dollars for the first year and plans to bring funding to 425 million in the next, when places should become 12 thousand and reach all five boroughs.
The total state investment of 1.2 billion also includes other interventions for preschool education and does not represent a permanent financing of the entire system imagined by Mamdani. At the time of the announcement, neither the mayor nor the governor Kathy Hochul had explained how the expansion would be financed after the second year. Hochul argued that the first phase can be covered with the revenue already available, while Mamdani proposed during the campaign to increase taxes on higher incomes and large companies.
A tax decision would depend on the government and state parliament of Albany. Without new state or federal resources, the city could gradually extend the service to two-year-olds and consolidate the 3-K, but it would hardly be able to guarantee in a short time full gratuitousness to all children under five years. The report argues that such a system would require billions of new revenue every year and should be introduced by stages, also because the city and the state cannot permanently finance the program through the deficit.
The new estimate does not show that universal asylum is unrealizable. It shows the distance between a pilot program from a few thousand places and a stable public system, accessible to hundreds of thousands of families. The available spaces could be sufficient for much expansion. The most complicated question will be to find almost 24 thousand people willing to work in the sector and to ensure every year enough money to pay them.
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