Daycare budget template
A childcare budget is not a generic small-business budget. Labor is enormous, occupancy is fixed, food may be partly reimbursed, and the whole thing turns on one ratio. Fill your numbers in and the percentages do the diagnosis.
Fill your own numbers over the placeholders. The percentages update as you type, which is the point — labor share is the line that decides everything else.
Monthly operating result
$8,250
surplus this month
- Revenue
- $51,200
- Expenses
- $42,950
- Payroll share of revenue
- 59%
- Occupancy share (rent)
- 13%
- Food share
- 5%
- Margin
- 16%
Read the labor percentage first
Labor share of revenue is the number that tells you whether the rest of the budget can work. It is set by ratio, wage and occupancy together, and none of the three moves quickly. Work out the labor line itself with the teacher pay calculator.
If it is uncomfortably high, the causes are almost always occupancy or the shape of the schedule rather than the wage. A room running below capacity carries the same teacher; a schedule with a long thin tail carries staff-hours nobody is paying for.
Put the load in payroll
Enter payroll including the employer's FICA, unemployment, workers' compensation and benefits. A budget that shows wages only understates the largest line by a fifth and makes every other percentage look worse than it is.
Food, and the program that pays part of it
Programs that join the Child and Adult Care Food Program get a per-meal reimbursement that meaningfully offsets the food line. For July 1 2026 through June 30 2027, centers in the contiguous states are reimbursed $2.54 for a free-rate breakfast, $4.76 for a free-rate lunch or supper and $1.30 for a free-rate snack; the paid-rate figures are $0.42, $0.45 and $0.12.
Those rates are set annually by USDA and adjusted each July to the Food Away From Home consumer price index — this year by 3.54%. The paperwork is real, but so is the money: a center serving two reimbursable meals and a snack a day to a room of free-rate children is recovering a substantial share of its food cost.
The lines people forget
Software and payment processing. Curriculum and assessment subscriptions. License renewals and background-check fees for new hires. Substitute cover. Repairs to things children break, which is all things. New hires cost more than their checks; the staff turnover cost calculator adds it up.
Put a line in for each, even a small one. A budget that is right about the big numbers and silent about eight small ones is out by more than it looks.
Sources
- USDA — CACFP Payment and Reimbursement Rates, July 2026 – June 2027fetched 2026-09-04
- BLS OOH — Childcare Workersfetched 2026-09-04