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What Child Care Actually Costs in Greater Portland, Maine

Published August 29, 2026 · 12 min read

There is exactly one child care center within twenty-five minutes of downtown Portland that will tell you, on its own website, what a week of infant care costs in September 2026. It is Toddle Inn in Cumberland Foreside. The number is $460.

You will have a hard time finding it. The rate card sits behind a small sidebar link labeled "Current Rates," two paragraphs below a sentence on the same page that reads "Contact the site manager for tuition rates, sibling discounts or to schedule a tour." And the file it opens is a scan. A photograph of a piece of paper, saved as a PDF, containing zero machine-readable characters. We checked: pulled the file, ran two text extractors over it, and got an empty string both times. No screen reader can read it. No search engine can index it. No assistant you ask can quote it. The number is public and mechanically invisible at the same time.

So we transcribed it, along with everything else on the page, and then we went looking for what the rest of the market publishes.

On August 29, 2026 we opened the public websites of eight child care and preschool providers inside twenty-five minutes of downtown Portland, plus the state's own rate survey. Four publish a full price. Two publish nothing. One publishes last year's price on a page its own homepage contradicts. One, a five-location chain, publishes a rate card for one location out of five.

The one full-day rate card in the market

Toddle Inn Cumberland Foreside, 10 Thomas Drive, Cumberland. Header on the sheet reads "Rates Effective September 7, 2026." All figures are per week.

The fees around the tuition matter more than parents expect, so here they are in full. A $150 enrollment fee, prepaid, to reserve the spot, which includes a Toddle Inn shirt or backpack. A $75 re-enrollment fee every year on your anniversary month. Sibling enrollment at $50 each after the first child. A $65 supply fee for Pre-K, also prepaid. A $25 insufficient-funds fee. Drop-in care at $16.00 per hour for stays under five hours. And a late pickup fee of $3.00 per minute, which is $180 an hour, the single most expensive number on the sheet.

Two operational details are worth reading twice. Parents supply all food and drink for children under one year; lunch is included after twelve months, with a two-day minimum. And the only recurring payment method Toddle Inn accepts is automatic withdrawal from a checking or savings account, taken weekly on the Friday before service. If you were planning to put child care on a credit card for the points, you cannot.

Five days of infant care at $460 is $23,920 over a full year. Five days of preschool at $382 is $19,864. Those are the two numbers most Greater Portland budgets actually turn on, and until now neither existed in a form you could read without a phone call.

What the state says the going rate is

Maine does publish a benchmark. The Office of Child and Family Services commissions a Child Care Market Rate Survey, and the current edition is dated May 9, 2024. It groups Cumberland with Sagadahoc and York, and reports full-time weekly rates at selected percentiles.

Those are centers. Family child care in someone's home runs materially cheaper in the same three counties: a $225 median for infants, $220 for toddlers, $205 for preschoolers, $150 for school-aged.

Now the honest part. Toddle Inn's $460 infant rate sits $130 above that $330 median, which is 39 percent higher. That gap is real but it is not a scandal, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The survey collected its rates in late 2023 and early 2024; phone follow-up to non-responding providers started on January 23, 2024. Comparing a September 2026 price to a winter 2024 median spans roughly two and a half years of wage and rent increases in a sector that had both. Some unknown share of that $130 is simply time passing.

The finding is not that one center is expensive. The finding is that the only public benchmark a Greater Portland parent can consult is two and a half years old, the survey behind it heard from 64 percent of providers, and almost nobody in the market publishes a current number you could check it against. You are asked to make the second-largest recurring purchase of your working life against a stale median and a phone call.

One more thing in that survey deserves attention, because it cuts against an assumption most parents arrive with. Cumberland County median rates broken out by the state's own quality rating do not climb cleanly with the rating. For infants: Star 2 centers at $330, Star 3 at $384, Star 4 at $339, Star 5 at $375. The report says so itself, noting that while higher-rated providers generally charge more, "there are several deviations from this pattern." Paying more does not reliably buy you a higher state rating, and a higher rating does not reliably cost more. Sixty-three percent of all licensed facilities in Maine sat at Star 2 anyway, including Toddle Inn's Cumberland site, whose page still describes itself under the program's former name.

Half-day nursery school is a different product, and the price gap is enormous

Three of the four providers that publish a price are morning programs. They are not substitutes for full-day care if two parents work, and comparing their annual figures to Toddle Inn's is comparing a part-time school year to fifty-two weeks of coverage. With that said, they publish, and here is what they publish.

Art Play Nursery School, 524 Allen Avenue, Portland, inside the Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church. A 501(c)(3) that has been open since 1981. Mornings run 8:30 to 11:30. Tuition is billed in nine monthly installments.

Plus a $100 non-refundable registration fee and the first month's tuition to hold the spot, and a sibling discount the school describes as "at least 10%" for a second child.

The Children's Nursery School, 159 State Street, Portland. A NAEYC-accredited parent cooperative, in Portland for fifty years, running Monday through Thursday from 9:00 to 12:30, September into early June, minimum age two years nine months. Its published tuition is $4,500 a year in ten installments of $450. That is the cheapest structured preschool price we found in Portland, and it is cheap for a reason the school states plainly: families are required to staff the classroom two mornings a month, attend monthly family meetings, and serve on a committee or the board of directors. You are buying at a discount because you are also part of the labor.

Read that price with one caveat. As of August 29, 2026 the school's homepage says it is at full enrollment for the 2026/2027 year with a waitlist open, while the Apply page carrying the tuition figure still reads "Spots still available for the current 2025-2026 school year" and labels the number "2025-2026 TUITION." The two pages disagree. The homepage is the current one. Treat $4,500 as last year's price until they update the other page.

Friends School of Portland, 11 US Route One in Cumberland Foreside, publishes a complete 2026-2027 schedule, which almost no early-childhood provider in this market does. Preschool full days run $18,820 for five days, $14,820 for three, $11,465 for two; the morning-only equivalents are $14,915, $11,560 and $8,570. Kindergarten is $21,825 and grades 1 through 8 are $24,460. The school also prints the terms, which is rarer and more useful than the tuition: a non-refundable enrollment deposit of $1,000 (or $750 for two or three-day preschool), due February 24, 2027 for returning students and March 24, 2027 for new ones, and a policy that any withdrawal after April 30 leaves the family owing 50 percent of the year's tuition. Its board sets tuition each January and publishes it in early February.

Notice that Friends School's five-day full-day preschool at $18,820 for a school year lands within about a thousand dollars of Toddle Inn's $19,864 for fifty-two weeks of preschool care. An independent Quaker school and a commercial child care chain arrive at nearly the same annual figure by completely different routes.

The two that publish nothing

St. Elizabeth's Child Development Center, run by Catholic Charities Maine in Portland, has a page titled "Services & Rates" with a section headed "Our Rates." The section contains no rate. It explains that the center accepts private-pay families and DHHS, ASPIRE and Transitional vouchers, then says: "Please call us for our current rates for toddler and preschool age care. Rates are based on the number of hours of care each child requires." We are not calling that dishonest. Hourly-variable pricing is genuinely hard to print. But a page whose title promises rates and whose body delivers a phone number is the most common shape in this market, and it is worth naming.

Bright Horizons operates a Portland center and its site renders more than fifteen thousand characters of content about curriculum, staffing and safety without a dollar sign anywhere. Corporate policy is that tuition varies by center, schedule and classroom, and families should contact the center.

The waitlist is the number that will actually decide this for you

Here is the part that makes the price question academic for most families with an infant. Toddle Inn does publish something genuinely rare across all five of its locations: the season it next expects an opening in each program. As of August 29, 2026:

Four of five locations do not expect an infant opening until spring or summer of 2027. If you are pregnant now and both parents intend to return to work, the relevant question is not whether $460 a week is a fair price. It is whether there is a room at all.

The state's data says the same thing at scale. At the time of the survey, 3,643 children sat on reported waitlists across Maine, and 78.5 percent of them were infants. Statewide licensed capacity was 48,857 slots across 1,544 providers as of October 2023. Infant care is the constrained good; everything else in the system is downstream of it.

What actually reduces the bill

Two programs, both with real published numbers, both underused.

The Child Care Affordability Program is Maine's subsidy, and its income ceiling is higher than most working families assume: up to 125 percent of Maine's median income. Families pay a copayment directly to their provider on a sliding scale of 1 to 10 percent of gross weekly income, and families under 30 percent of state median income pay no copay at all. You choose your own approved provider, including YMCAs and Head Starts. The state's provider directory is at childcarechoices.me.

The Maine child care tax credit is worth checking even at higher incomes. Maine Revenue Services states it plainly: the credit equals 25 percent of your federal child and dependent care credit, it doubles if the expenses were paid to a quality-certified provider, and it is refundable up to $500. That is 36 M.R.S. section 5218. Ask your provider for its quality certificate number before you file, not after.

If you are working out whether the whole move pencils, our Portland cost of living breakdown puts these numbers next to housing, and the school calendar and first-day guide covers what happens once the child ages out of all of this. The same disclosure pattern we found here shows up in what a vet visit costs and in gym membership pricing: one operator prints everything, everyone else asks you to call.

FAQ

How much does child care cost per week in Portland, Maine?

The only current published full-day rate at a Greater Portland center as of August 29, 2026 is at Toddle Inn in Cumberland Foreside: $460 per week for five days of infant or toddler care and $382 per week for five days of preschool, effective September 7, 2026. Maine's own 2024 Child Care Market Rate Survey put the median full-time weekly center rate for Cumberland, Sagadahoc and York counties at $330 for infants and $300 for preschoolers, but that survey collected its data in late 2023 and early 2024.

How much does daycare cost per year near Portland, Maine?

At the one published rate card in the market, five days a week of infant care works out to $23,920 a year and five days of preschool to $19,864, before a $150 enrollment fee and a $75 annual re-enrollment fee. Half-day nursery school is far cheaper because it is a different product: Art Play Nursery School charges $8,910 a year for five mornings and The Children's Nursery School charges $4,500 a year for four mornings in a parent cooperative.

Why won't child care centers publish their prices?

Most give a version of the same reason, that rates depend on the hours and age of each child, which is true for hourly-variable programs. St. Elizabeth's Child Development Center in Portland says exactly that on a page titled "Services & Rates." The practical effect is that a parent cannot compare two centers without two phone calls, and the only public benchmark available is a state survey now more than two years old.

How long is the waitlist for infant care near Portland?

Toddle Inn publishes next-opening seasons for all five of its Greater Portland-area locations, and as of August 29, 2026 four of the five did not expect an infant opening before spring or summer 2027. Only the Westbrook location listed an infant opening in Winter 2026. Statewide, the 2024 market rate survey recorded 3,643 children on reported waitlists, of whom 78.5 percent were infants.

Does a higher state quality rating mean higher tuition?

Not reliably. Maine's own survey found 50th-percentile weekly infant rates in Cumberland County of $330 at Star 2 centers, $384 at Star 3, $339 at Star 4 and $375 at Star 5, and the report notes several deviations from the expected pattern. Sixty-three percent of licensed child care facilities in Maine were rated Star 2. The rating is worth checking on its own merits, not as a price signal.

Can I get help paying for child care in Maine?

Yes, and the income limit is higher than most families expect. The Child Care Affordability Program covers families up to 125 percent of Maine's median income, with a family copayment on a sliding scale of 1 to 10 percent of gross weekly income and no copayment below 30 percent of state median income. Separately, Maine Revenue Services offers an income tax credit worth 25 percent of your federal child and dependent care credit, doubled for a quality-certified provider and refundable up to $500.

What is the cheapest preschool in Portland, Maine?

The lowest published price we found is The Children's Nursery School at 159 State Street, a NAEYC-accredited parent cooperative charging $4,500 a year in ten installments of $450 for four mornings a week. That price is low because participation is required: families staff the classroom two mornings a month, attend monthly meetings, and serve on a committee or the board. Note that the school's homepage reports full enrollment for 2026/2027 while the page carrying the price still labels it as 2025-2026 tuition.