Retrieve county-level child care price data from the DOL Women's Bureau's National Database of Childcare Prices
domain: dataportal.dol.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Start at dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/featured-childcare to confirm the current dataset release (NDCP covers 2008-2022 per the 2024 technical report)
Query the dataset programmatically via the DOL Open Data Portal at dataportal.dol.gov/datasets/10278 rather than scraping the Women's Bureau pages
Alternatively, download the full county-level file directly as XLSX from dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/NDCP2022.xlsx for offline analysis
Use the accompanying Technical Report PDF (dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/National-Database-of-Childcare-Prices-Technical-Report.pdf) to understand methodology, suppression rules, and the county-level ACS variables joined into the data
For pre-computed summaries, use the public Tableau dashboards (Fast Facts and County Factsheets, linked from the same DOL page) instead of re-deriving them from raw data
Known gotchas
Update cadence is irregular per the dataset's own metadata — this is not a live/real-time feed, and the current release only runs through 2022 despite being published in 2024
Two overlapping releases exist on the same DOL page (the original 2008-2018 file and the current 2008-2022 NDCP2022 file); make sure you're pulling the current file rather than an archived version
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