Childcare Center Economics: Ratios, Enrolment, Tuition & Staffing Costs

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Work out how many children each room may hold by floor space and by group size, take the smaller of the two and add up the licensed places by age group.
• Look up the ratio for each age group, round the staff needed up to whole people, find the spare places at that staffing and total the staff on the floor.
• Convert a mix of full-time and part-time children into full-time equivalents, calculate occupancy per room and for the center, and count the rooms below the occupancy target.
• Split each age group's revenue into private-pay and subsidy revenue, find the blended revenue per FTE for the center and measure how much the subsidy mix costs compared with the private rate.
• Turn opening hours and room ratios into paid hours, whole 8-hour shifts and the monthly staff cost of the center.
• Share the overhead by floor space, build the full monthly cost of every room, turn it into a cost per FTE child and a margin, and let a formula name the weakest room.
• Forecast six months of enrolment from leavers, waitlist conversion and the enrolment limit, link each month to the next and chart the forecast against the limit.
• Find the FTE and the occupancy at which the center breaks even, then test whether a new preschool room pays for itself and how fast.