What the Numbers Tell Us

The real story isn't the net loss — it's the churn underneath it

A net loss of 437 programs sounds gradual. It isn't. Beneath that number, 1,563 programs disappeared entirely and 1,126 new ones took their place — nearly a third of the entire system turned over in just over 25 months.

Churn at this scale matters even when replacements arrive: every closure severs relationships between families and caregivers, and every new program starts with no quality track record. A system that swaps out a third of its providers in two years is not stable — it is running to stand still, and losing ground anyway.

Home-based childcare is collapsing

Every home-based category is shrinking fast. Type B family homes — the backbone of home-based care — have lost 627 providers and replaced fewer than half. In-home aides are nearly extinct.

Net change by program type, July 2024 → latest. Day camps excluded.

This matters because home-based providers serve the families centers often can't: rural communities, non-traditional hours, infants, lower-income households. When a Type B home closes in a small county, there is frequently no licensed alternative within reasonable distance — the slot doesn't move, it vanishes.

The rating system is collapsing — because it's no longer required

Step Up To Quality's middle tiers are hollowing out. Since July 2024:

Programs by SUTQ rating (all types, excl. day camps).

New programs opening unrated has always been the normal pathway — a rating takes time to earn. What's happening now is different in kind, not just degree. The state eliminated the requirement that centers and Type A homes be rated to receive public funding, and the registry shows what happens when quality assurance becomes optional:

• The unrated share among publicly-funded providers — the group that used to be required to participate in SUTQ — jumped from 18.6% to 39.6% in two years.
• Of the 249 centers that dropped from 1-star to unrated, 238 kept their public-funding agreement anyway. Walking away from the rating now costs a provider nothing.
• 375 of the 678 new centers are both publicly funded and unrated — being rated is no longer standard operating procedure for new programs.
• Among surviving centers, downgrades outnumber upgrades 396 to 253; only the top tier is holding (92% of 3-star centers kept their rating).

The trend is not slowing. In the nine weeks between the June 12 and August 16, 2026 snapshots alone, the number of unrated programs rose by 73 while every rated tier fell — 1-star by 76, 2-star by 24, 3-star by 55. Ohio shed 155 rated programs in 65 days.

That last figure is the one to sit with. More than half of the rated programs Ohio lost in those seven weeks did not close — 123 still-open programs gave up their star rating (against only 56 earning one), while 64 rated programs closed and just 6 opened rated. The state is not mainly losing rated programs because they shut down. It is losing them because operating without a rating has become the easier choice.

The result is a quality crisis in plain sight: nearly half the system now carries no rating at all, and parents have less visibility into program quality than they did two years ago. SUTQ is mid-transition to a new Bronze/Silver/Gold system — but with participation voluntary and unrated the de facto default, the data so far shows providers exiting quality accountability, not migrating to a new version of it.

The losses are concentrated where the most families are

61 of Ohio's 88 counties have fewer licensed programs than in July 2024 — but the deepest losses are in the state's biggest population centers:

Net change in licensed programs by county, July 2024 → latest.

Urban losses hit low-income neighborhoods hardest, where transportation makes proximity essential. Rural losses are smaller in number but often eliminate the only licensed option in a community. Program-number tracking confirms these are genuine disappearances, not relocations or re-licensing.

Whatever is driving this, it's speeding up

The closure rate has not been steady. Comparing the three phases the data covers:

That is a 15.5x acceleration over the 2024 baseline — roughly 1.4 net closures per day. At the current pace Ohio is on track to be down nearly 640 programs by the end of 2026.

The pace within 2026 has not been uniform. The record interval was May 13 – June 12 (86 programs in 30 days, about 87 per month); June 12 – July 31 ran at about 48 per month, roughly half that. The 16 days after July 31 gave up only 4 more programs, but a two-week window is far too short to read as a trend — routine batch license processing can swing it either way. The cumulative Feb-2026-onward rate is the measure that resists that noise, and it has eased only modestly, from 47.0 to 43.8 per month as the window has lengthened.

The data can't say why — candidates include the November 2025 hour-authorization changes, expiration of stabilization funding, workforce shortages, and enrollment economics — but it can say the pressure has not let up: even the moderated rate is an order of magnitude above the 2024 baseline.

The public-funding footprint is growing — a qualified bright spot

Participation in Publicly Funded Child Care agreements rose from 70.8% to 73.7% among centers, and new centers arrive with PFCC agreements at a higher rate (82%) than the centers they replace (76%). Among surviving centers, 99 gained agreements and only 23 lost them.

Two caveats. First, a PFCC agreement is a floor, not a ceiling: most of the new PFCC-participating centers are still unrated. Second, the March 2025 snapshot shows a swing in PFCC rates (down 14 points, then fully recovered) that is almost certainly a reporting artifact — so treat fine-grained PFCC trends with care.

Ohio's childcare system isn't just shrinking — it's restructuring

Put the six findings together and a coherent picture emerges. The system is shifting from distributed, home-based, rated care toward concentrated, center-based, unrated care — while shrinking overall and shedding capacity fastest in the communities with the most children.

• Fewer choices for rural families and families needing non-standard hours.
• Less visibility into quality, as the unrated share of the system grows past 48%.
• More instability, as turnover churns through familiar providers at record pace.

None of these trends is self-correcting. The acceleration in Finding 5 is the strongest argument that this is a policy problem, not a market cycle.