Early childhood education and care is in a state of crisis in Australia, crippled by workforce shortages, patchy availability and rising fees.
Government subsidies increased earlier this year, but families’ fees have also increased, in many cases offsetting most or all of the benefit. The cost burden overall is being felt more by households that were already facing disadvantage.
Guardian Australia has mapped the average fee for an hour of childcare across Australia by statistical area. You can search for your area on the map below.
Average fees are highest in mining regions of Western Australia, as well in inner-city suburbs of major capital cities, including Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
There is a huge amount of variability in price across the country, and even across cities: from about $10 an hour in parts of Hobart to more than $16 in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
The map also shows the percentage change in average fees for the year to June 2023, and this tells a different story. The areas with the largest rises in costs are mostly ex-urban and regional areas – with the largest increases in regional Queensland, the Northern Territory and New South Wales.
Katherine in the Northern Territory has seen an almost 18% increase in average fees, while several recently flood-hit regions in northern New South Wales have seen increases of more than 10%.
Analysis from the Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute has shown that the “mixed model” of childcare provision – combining for-profit services with not-for-profit services with government subsidies to families for fees – has resulted in a glut of services with higher prices in more affluent areas of the country, and some areas with few or no services at all.
The institute calls those areas childcare “deserts”. The map below shows these.
Some of the areas with large increases in childcare fees overlap with childcare deserts, such as Katherine in the Northern Territory or the north-east of Tasmania, where the entire population lives in a childcare desert.
However, many areas that have seen big increases are comparatively well serviced by childcare centres, such as Sunnybank and Carindale in greater Brisbane, or Yarra in greater Melbourne.
You can see how much average childcare fees have risen over the past 10 years in the chart above. Centre-based daycare and family daycare have seen the steepest increases in price, according to the data put together from Department of Education reports.