Calculator
Child care tuition rate floor calculator
Work out the daily and weekly tuition your program must charge to cover itself, using your own costs, the weeks you are open and the vacancy you actually carry.
Free tools
Free calculators for home daycare and small centers
Two quick calculators built from the numbers that actually decide whether a family child care home stays open: what a slot has to earn, and what the paperwork costs you in hours.
Child care runs on two scarce things, money and minutes, and both get estimated badly. Tuition often gets set by looking at what the provider down the road charges, which imports her rent, her enrollment and her vacancy into your budget. Paperwork time gets waved off as a few minutes a day, right up to the evening you spend two hours copying nap times off a legal pad into the file.
These calculators put your own numbers in front of you. Neither one asks for an email, and neither one produces a proposal. Change the defaults to match your program, look at the results, and take them into your next rate conversation or your next decision about whether the notebook on the counter is still working.
Calculator
Daily sheet and sleep check time calculator
See how many visual sleep checks your nap room generates and how many hours a year you spend writing them and the daily sheets by hand.
Working document
The child file and daily record audit
Work through your own files the way a licensor does, one stack at a time, and fix the gaps before somebody else finds them.
Why the child care calculators sit open with no sign up
Every number on this page is arithmetic a provider is already doing by hand, usually on the back of a menu sheet during nap. Two and a half hours of crib time divided by a fifteen minute check interval, times three infants, to see how many visual sleep checks one afternoon will generate. Liability insurance, the licensing fee, utilities and the food cost left over after the food program claim, all split across six slots to find what a single toddler day has to bring in. Then the unpaid weeks between a two year old leaving for preschool in August and the next family starting after Labor Day. That math should not cost anybody an email address.
So neither calculator asks for an account, and the answers are worth having whether or not you ever open NapLog. A rate floor printout is something to put on the table when a family asks why tuition moved, or when your subsidy rate gets discussed for the coming year. An annual hours figure is something to weigh against the spiral notebook on the kitchen counter, and against the evening you spend copying nap times and meal counts into the child files. Both stand on their own in a program that never buys software at all.
Put those hours and that floor against a real nap window
Both figures on this page point at the same evening, the one spent turning a legal pad into daily sheets after the last pickup. A demo shows the other version, where each bottle, solid, diaper change and timed sleep check is tapped in at the crib or the table and the parent report is finished before the door opens at five. Bring the numbers you just ran and we will work from them.