San Francisco tackles affordability problems with free child care

While San Francisco is one of the most notoriously expensive places to live in the United States, the city’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, has unveiled a plan to help drive down costs. It involves providing free and subsidized child care for families across the city. Part of a larger effort by Lurie to ease the city’s cost burden, experts say this move is a good first step toward making the City by the Bay more affordable.

What is on offer?

The new child care program is part of an “action plan with steps to make housing, child care, education, food, health care and transportation more affordable for San Franciscans,” said Lurie’s office in a press release. The tentpole of this program will “expand free child care for low- and middle-income families at more than 500 high-quality providers across the city.”

For families of four earning up to $230,000 per year, child care will be free at these locations, while families of four earning up to $310,000 per year will get a 50% subsidy for child care. While it may seem counterintuitive to offer free child care to families making six figures, San Francisco “consistently ranks among the most expensive cities in the U.S., with housing, child care and other daily costs exceeding national averages,” said Bloomberg. Full-time child care for an infant in San Francisco “can cost as much as $30,000 a year, an expense that can rival rent payments.”

Will this help San Francisco’s affordability?

The expansion of child care will be “funded by a $570 million reserve of unspent money from a commercial rent tax voters approved in 2018,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. As a result of the new program, about “12,000 children under age 5 will become newly eligible for child care tuition support and more than 7,000 other children are expected to see their current financial support doubled.”

Many in the city are feeling positive about the new program. For families in the “middle-income range, child care costs are an enormous burden. This investment offers real relief,” said Sara O’Neill, the founder of the San Francisco-based Slippery Fish Preschool, in a statement obtained by SFGate.

Many parents struggling to afford child care also seem to be looking forward to the program. “It would be a huge difference for our family,” Sarah Klevan, a mother of two, told KQED San Francisco. While Klevan and her husband each make six-figure salaries, they “live paycheck-to-paycheck in San Francisco” and spend about $2,000 per month for child care for their two kids. “We’re really lucky to have family nearby [to provide backup care],” Klevan said. “I really don’t think it would be feasible for us to live here otherwise.”

But there is also a question of whether the mayor’s office is doing this simply as part of a political message. Democrats like Lurie “seized on voters’ concerns about the high costs of housing, child care, health care, food and other essentials as they won major races” across the nation, said the Chronicle. Lurie, who took office in 2025, isn’t up for reelection soon, but wants to “promote the national narrative that San Francisco is bouncing back on his watch.”