Increasing Quality in Early Care and Education Programs: Effects on Expenses and Revenues

The Provider Cost of Quality Calculator (PCQC) is an easy-to-use, dynamic Web-based tool from the Office of Child Care’s (OCC) National Center on Child Care Quality Improvement (NCCCQI), available for use by state and territory policymakers to help them understand the costs associated with high-quality early care and education.

The tool can be used to demonstrate the financial implications for a provider to produce a given level of quality. The design of quality initiatives and financial supports can be informed by the size of the gap between revenue and expenses at different quality levels and for various provider types.

The purpose of this issue brief is to demonstrate how the PCQC can be used to model and understand the impact of increasing quality on the revenue and expenses of an early childhood center or family child care (FCC) home. The brief discusses the effects of the following variables on provider financial health and viability: