DOI: 10.3886/icpsr38539
title: Child Care Licensing Study, United States, 2020
title: Archival Version

description: The 2020 Child Care Licensing Study provides information collected about child care licensing programs and policies and the facility requirements for child care centers, family child care homes, and group child care homes for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The data about licensing requirements for child care centers, family child care homes, and group child care homes were collected by the National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance from the regulations posted on the National Database of Child Care Licensing Regulations that were in effect as of December 31, 2020. The licensing regulations data cover the following areas:

Licensing regulations
Additional staff training requirements
Definition of licensed child care centers
Child-staff ratios and group size
Staff roles and age requirements
Supervision of children
Staff qualifications and ongoing training requirements
Care of children
Facility requirements
Staff hiring requirements

The same web site was used to collect licensing regulations covering the above listed topics for small family child care homes and large/group family child care homes.
description: The role of licensing in the early care and education system is to provide a mandatory floor of program standards and monitoring that will protect children from physical harm and enhance learning and development. Within the early care and education system, licensing covers the broadest content, the largest number of children ages birth to school-age, and the largest population of providers.
description: Response Rates: Responses for regulations and statutes were received from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
description: Datasets: 
DS0: Study-Level Files
DS1: State Child Care Center Regulations Data
DS2: State Small Family Child Care Home Regulations Data
DS3: State Large/Group Family Child Care Home Regulations Data
description: State child care licensing agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Smallest Geographic Unit: State
description: web-based surveyThese briefs describe licensing requirements for child care centers and group / family homes in 2020, and identifies trends from previous years of data collection. The data in these briefs were collected from state child care licensing regulations by the National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance from regulations that were current as of December 31, 2020.
Trends In Child Care Center Licensing Regulations And Policies For 2020
Trends In Family Child Care Home Licensing Regulations And Policies For 2020
Trends In Group Child Care Home Licensing Regulations And Policies For 2020This year of data collection does not contain the "survey files" of the state licensing programs and policies like the 2017 data collection has. This was due to difficulty getting states to respond during the COVID-19 pandemic.For each data file the variables follow the order laid out in the accompanying data dictionaries. This is a change in how the files were organized in the 2017 data (ICPSR 37700).Many of the variables in the State Licensing Programs and Policies Data are the same question asked of the different types of child care facilities. The following is a key of the common abbreviations found in variable names.
C: Child Care Center
F: Small Family Child Care Home
LF: Large/Group Family Child Care HomeFor the 2020 data, checkboxes were used for some variables. This led to changes in their variable coding to assist with data analysis, as states may be coded under more than one category. These changes created some variance in variable names, labels, and value labels compared to prior years. The vast majority of the variables can be analyzed across the data in the Child Care Licensing Study series. The data dictionaries contain a worksheet listing out new variables added in 2020.Due to limitations in statistical software packages, string (character) variables greater than 244 characters were truncated. The full responses for these variables surpassing this length were exported to a comma delimited file (.csv) which is available for download, and can be linked to the data file via the variable <strong>STATE</strong>. ICPSR provided an additional Excel document that lists out these exported long strings broken out by dataset and sub-section.The Child Care Center (DS1) data contains cases for the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI) and Puerto Rico (PR). However, there is zero valid data for these territories. They are 100% blank. These two territories are not listed in the small family (DS2) or large group (DS3) data files.