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For the first time in more than a year, New York City will begin issuing childcare vouchers to thousands of children sitting on a ballooning waitlist for the popular program, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Monday.
The voucher program provides kids up to age 13 from low-income families an average of $300 a week to pay for childcare. Its waitlist had mushroomed to 30,000 as of last month, but in the coming days, city officials said they will begin awarding vouchers to 10,000 of those children.
“I am so proud to announce there is light at the end of the voucher tunnel,” Mamdani said Monday at a press conference in the Bronx. “For the first time in 15 months, NYC is taking children off the voucher waitlist, and this is only the beginning.”
Mamdani said the city will continue taking more kids off the waitlist “on a rolling basis” after the initial 10,000 offers.
The city will prioritize families with incomes below 300% of the federal poverty line, families experiencing homelessness, and families with children with disabilities, officials said.
The growing waitlist had become a top concern for families and advocates, who said clearing it could make an immediate dent in the city’s childcare affordability crisis.
The program surged in popularity in recent years after Gov. Kathy Hochul expanded eligibility and increased the value of the vouchers. New York City’s voucher enrollment has grown from around 40,000 in 2021 to roughly 113,000 today.
Even as the voucher program’s budget has grown to roughly $2 billion this fiscal year, city officials have struggled to keep up with demand.
Advocates and budget experts have contended for months that the city has untapped funds it could use to enroll more families. But city officials have taken a cautious approach, in part to ensure money was available if a surge of families receiving federal cash assistance — whose childcare the city is required to subsidize — requested vouchers.
The city’s promise to enroll 10,000 kids from the waitlist will rely on $475 million in state “matching funds” that Hochul committed to the city earlier this year, according to officials and budget experts. Those funds are only available if the city contributes an equal amount from its own coffers. A Mamdani spokesperson didn’t immediately confirm whether the city is contributing its own funds or where that money is coming from.
Hochul committed the $475 million in matching funds months ago as part of the state budget, but Mamdani said Monday the city needed time to fully review the voucher program’s finances and ensure it had the funds to continue providing the new vouchers until kids age out of the program.
“We do not want to celebrate something on Monday and then announce on Friday, actually there’s been an issue,” he said at the press conference.
The voucher program operates on a different model than Mamdani’s signature childcare initiative, 2-K. In that program, like the city’s free programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, the city directly funds providers — a model that gives the city more oversight and ability to set the parameters of the program.
But 2-K is also more expensive and logistically complicated to set up. Advocates and experts say that while the city is building those seats for 2-year-olds, the vouchers remain an important tool to get families free childcare.
Addressing the growing waitlist, families and childcare providers said, is a win-win: It makes an immediate dent in the childcare affordability crisis and helps providers fill seats and stabilize their budgets.
Tara Gardner, the executive director of the Day Care Council of New York, an umbrella organization for hundreds of childcare providers, said enrolling families off the voucher waitlist is the “most effective and immediate way to expand access.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.
