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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.
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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.
The rate floor is the number below which a slot loses money. It is not your target rate and it is not what you should charge; it is the line under everything. Most providers who feel underpaid are charging within a few dollars of their floor, because the floor was never calculated and the rate was copied from somebody else.
Three inputs do most of the damage when they are guessed. Weeks open, because closure weeks and holidays are unpaid unless your contract says otherwise. Vacancy days, because a slot that turns over twice a year rarely fills the same Monday it empties. And your own pay, because if you enter what is left over instead of what you intend to earn, the calculator will faithfully confirm that you should keep earning it.
Your result
Billable child days per year
1,428
Care days you can actually bill once vacancy is taken out of every slot.
Total annual cost to run
$76,869
Labor, fixed overhead and food across a full year of operation.
Daily rate floor per child
$53.83
The point where a filled day pays for itself and nothing more.
Weekly rate floor per child
$269.15
The same floor stated the way most families read a tuition rate.
This is a break even line, not a price; add your margin on top of it before you publish a rate sheet.
Why vacancy days move the number so much
A family child care home with six slots has no bench. When a two year old moves to preschool in August and the replacement starts after Labor Day, that slot lost roughly three weeks of income and none of its cost. Rent, insurance and your own time did not shrink. Spread across only six slots, three weeks of one empty slot moves the floor for everybody.
That is why the calculator asks for vacancy days per slot rather than a tidy occupancy percentage. Providers can usually remember the actual gaps from last year. Add them up, divide by the number of slots, and enter the real figure. If your waiting list is genuinely deep enough that slots refill the same week, enter a small number and watch the floor drop.
What to do with the floor once you have it
Compare the weekly floor with what you charge now. If the gap is small or negative, you are running a program that pays for itself only when nobody is sick, nothing breaks and nobody leaves. That is the position that turns one bad quarter into a closure, and it is far more common in home programs than in centers.
Then raise deliberately rather than apologetically. Give families a written notice period, hold the increase for existing enrollment if you want to, and set new enrollments at the corrected rate immediately. Keep the printout. When a parent asks why the rate moved, a page showing food, insurance and vacancy is a far better answer than a paragraph about rising costs.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include my own pay if I take a draw?
Yes, and enter the amount you intend to earn rather than the amount currently left over. If you leave it out, the calculator will tell you a slot is profitable while you work for nothing. Enter payroll taxes too, since self employment tax is a real cost of your own labor.
How do I handle food program reimbursement?
Subtract the reimbursement you actually receive from your food cost and enter the net figure per child per day. If your sponsor pays at different tiers or your claim varies by month, use an average from last year. Keep the gross and the reimbursement in your own records, since your sponsor and a reviewer may ask for both.
Does the floor include part time children?
Not directly. The simplest approach is to convert part time enrollment into full time equivalents before entering the count, so three children attending two days each count as a bit over one slot. Then set part time rates above the pro rated floor, since a part time slot is harder to pair and rarely fills the remaining days.
More free tools and working documents
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.
Take that number into the nap room
The result above came from your own inputs, not from a claim of ours. If it landed higher than you expected, watch the same day logged as it happens, with every visual check stamped at the crib and the licensing record building itself out of the entries you were making anyway. Fifteen minutes, starting from the figure on your screen.