How much does a year of infant daycare cost in the United States?

How to get close to this number

Work from the staffing ratio. Infant care is legally capped at a few babies per carer, so a year of care is roughly a third to a quarter of a carer's annual salary plus premises and overheads. That arithmetic gives a figure in the low tens of thousands.

The productivity point in the explanation is the structural reason this cannot get cheaper: staff-to-child ratios are set by law, so there is almost no way to make the service more productive. Nearly every other sector has reduced costs by producing more per worker; childcare is defined by not doing that.

The comparison in the explanation makes the consequence concrete: in the most expensive states it exceeds in-state college tuition. Paying more to have an infant looked after than to have a young adult educated is the visible symptom of a service where labour is the entire product and the labour cannot be compressed.