2025-09-09 13:30
1:30
September 9, 2025
afternoon
As unprecedented, New Mexico is offering parenting for free.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced this week that starting in November, it will be the first state in the United States to provide child care for all residents.
Since the early childhood education and nursing department was created in 2019, the state has been reducing child care costs and has begun expanding eligibility for universal child care. This latest change completely eliminates the state’s income eligibility requirements for parenting assistance programs and waives the money shared by all families.
The initiative is expected to save families $12,000 a year.
“Children care is crucial for family stability, workforce participation and the future prosperity of New Mexico,” Lujan Grisham said in the announcement. “By investing in universal child care, we are providing economic relief to families, supporting our economy, and ensuring every child has opportunities to grow and grow.”
The U.S. allocates some federal funds to states to reduce childcare costs for low-income children, but the funding is very limited, and overall, most families pay an average of $13,000 in childcare per year. In many states, it is much higher.
In the absence of a federal universal child care system, some states have been working to build their own systems, and New Mexico has been the leader in this effort for the past few years.
At the recent legislative session, the state's early childhood education and nursing department's budget increased by $113 million, with its total operating budget reaching nearly $1 billion. Half of the money is dedicated to parenting payment support.
The state also established a fund in 2020 and will be dedicated to early childhood education. Thanks to tax collections in the oil and gas industry, the fund has grown from $320 million to $10 billion. Latinos in New Mexico led the charge in 2022 to help pass a constitutional amendment that ensures a portion of the fund is dedicated to universal childcare. A governor's spokesman said the funding for the new plan will come from at least part of it from there.
The news also brings improvements to childcare facilities and potentially improves for its staff. As part of the promotion, the state will establish a $13 million loan fund to build and expand facilities, launch recruitment campaigns for family providers, and incentivize programs to pay at least $18 per hour.
The state hopes the program will lead to the creation of 55 new childcare centers and 1,120 family childcare options.
Still, the reactions to the plan so far are mixed. Rebecca Dow, a Republican state, told the Albuquerque Journal that she believes child care certificates for child abuse and neglect should be retained. As the state's parenting assistance program expanded its eligibility over the past five years, fewer low-income families participated in the program, the Journal reported.
But Mescalero Apache Tribe's president Thora Walsh Padilla praised the initiative in a press conference Monday that it addressed various challenges the tribe faced, including raising the wages of its providers. Of the 463,000 acre reservations, there are only three nurseries.
“It's so timely that it can meet a lot of needs,” she said. “Buildings? Oh my goodness, we'll be one of the first people to apply.”