It might seem crazy to people who don’t have children, but I start planning for my kids’ summer vacation in the darkest days of winter.
It’s an intense process. In January I begin updating my giant spreadsheet of camp registration dates and costs. Then I strategize how to simultaneously sign up two kids for slots in the most popular local day camps before they fill up—sometimes within 30 seconds of registration opening. And last, but certainly not least, I try to figure out how to pay for those camps. Keeping kids occupied in the summer so I can work does not come cheap.
In 2026 the national average for summer day camp is $385 per week, up from $350 in 2024. Over a 10-week summer, a family with one kid will pay at least $3,850.
Local day camps in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I live with my husband and two kids, range between $300 and $500 per week per child. In past years, we’ve typically spent around $6,000 a year on summer camp—a necessary expense when my husband and I both worked full time. It is the largest expense in our household budget after housing and groceries.
When I was laid off last June, summer camp was the first expense I cut. I kept a few weeks of the camps my kids loved because I felt guilty disrupting their whole summer. But I couldn’t justify spending thousands of dollars on care even if I knew it meant less time to job hunt.
This winter, the January summer camp scramble came with a new complication. I’m working as a freelancer these days, and I wasn’t sure I could justify spending $900 a week for two kids in camp when my income is so unpredictable.
All of it—the scramble to sign up for camp each winter, the rising costs, and my own career instability—has left me feeling frustrated and undersupported. We live in one of the world’s richest nations, which seems to have no trouble finding the funds to cover unpopular wars and unnecessary ballroom renovation. So why isn’t summer camp free? Or at least more affordable for working parents?
Why are camp costs so damn high?
How did we get to the point where parents compare the stress of registering their kids for camp to being part of The Hunger Games? And why does sending one kid to camp for a summer cost more than some people spend on their monthly mortgage payments?
The summer camp problem is similar to the problem facing parents of young children. In the U.S., the powers that be decided kindergarten through 12th grade is essential for a functioning society—after all, future adults need to be educated. But we still treat child care and early childhood education as optional and push the burden to families to sort out how to find and pay for the service.
This is in large part a relic of our government trying to encourage the “traditional” family structures of single-earner households. Summer camp is an extension of that. Why would the government subsidize summer care for kids if their mothers are home to watch them?
Of course, that’s not our reality: As of 2024, 78% of moms with kids ages 6 to 17 and 68% of moms with kids under six were working outside the home.
And while the tide of public and political opinion has been turning in recent years, with politicians on both sides of the aisle arguing in favor of universal or subsidized child care for kids under five, summer camp has been (mostly) left out of the conversation. That’s in part because the public’s perception of summer camp is much more complicated than their feelings about daycare. Camp experiences can vary so much—from the most basic rec centers offerings to more specialized (and expensive) programs with robotics, sports, or filmmaking—and as a result, many people have come to see summer camp as optional enrichment, not as essential child care.
It’s part of a bigger shift with how we’re raising kids in the 21st century, argues author and economist Corinne Low. “My research shows that parenting time really intensified in the 1990s,” she said, adding that parents are increasingly focused on investing in a child’s “human capital.”
“I see summer camps as just an extension of this,” Low says. “It’s not just that there’s the basic supply-and-demand issues that [drive up costs]. It’s also that the product that we’re paying for is changing. The 1980s model of [summer camp] with 30 kids and one high school–aged counselor who’s giving everybody popsicles and letting them play dodge ball in the gym is being replaced by a more intensive, more bespoke model that parents can think of as enrichment, not only babysitting.”
Still, even if parents don’t think of camp as a résumé-building activity, the cost of the classic YMCA or city park department camp still clocks in at around $300 a week per kid. The free or low-cost summer camp slots available in many cities are reserved for very-low-income families, and the demand often exceeds availability.
We’ve also seen children’s freedom disappear in the last few decades—and as a result, many parents don’t feel comfortable leaving elementary school children home alone for long stretches. When I was in elementary school in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I spent my summers with my friends—riding bikes around our small town and swimming at my neighbor’s pool—while my mom was at work. That kind of unsupervised childhood is far from the norm now. Children are expected to be constantly supervised for much longer—surveys have found that many parents don’t let their kids play outside alone until they are 11.
Are there better options?
It’s probably not surprising that other countries don’t have this same summer camp crisis.
Asian countries including China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea often send their children to school year-round with shorter, more frequent breaks, as do many European countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands.
In Germany, parents only need to find summer coverage for roughly a month. And many get enough paid vacation from their jobs that they’re able to take time off to enjoy a holiday with their families.
France, Sweden, and even Canada all provide their citizens with tax-payer-subsidized after-school and summer-care programs. Families pay as little as $10 a day.
Back in the U.S., some parents have figured out a way to bypass the system altogether. Katherine Goldstein is a North Carolina-based author and the voice behind the Double Shift newsletter. She’s the mom of a 10-year-old and six-year-old twins. Last winter, she decided she was officially priced out of summer camp for her three kids when she realized it was going to cost over $10,000. Goldstein decided there had to be a better way.
“There are parts of parenting where we feel like we don’t have a choice,” she says. “But when it comes to spending large amounts of money, sometimes we have more choice than we realize.”
In the summer of 2025, Goldstein teamed up with a friend to hire a long-term babysitter for the first half of the summer, which cost hundreds less than the local day camp. Then she packed up her family and headed to Costa Rica for five weeks. They used credit card points to cover the cost of flights and car rental, and they found an affordable rental house. Goldstein and her husband were both able to work remotely, and their kids attended what she called “a more laid-back ’90s-style” summer camp where they learned to surf. Four weeks of the Costa Rican camp cost around $1,200, which is close to what she would have spent for one week of camp for three kids back home in North Carolina.
Her family loved the experience so much that they plan to do it again this summer—and for the foreseeable future. She acknowledges that her approach isn’t accessible to everyone but encourages parents to think about summer care in a more collective way, such as swapping weeks off with other families, taking extended vacations with friends, and enlisting middle school kids who have aged out of day camp to help babysit.
Goldstein was so inspired by her Costa Rican adventure that she created a guide on how other families can pull off a summer abroad.
Lindsey Stanberry
There are glimmers of hope
Parents hoping for federal or state solutions to our summer camp issue might be disappointed. While there are some small strides being made in a few states, it’s still just a drop in the bucket.
New Mexico made headlines last fall when it announced a new statewide universal child care program. The funding covers children up to 13 and includes summer care. However, while the policy officially launched on November 1, 2025, implementation has been challenging, especially in rural areas. Care for school-age kids has been difficult to set up as most of the existing infrastructure is for birth to preschool age children. The state estimates it will need at least 5,000 additional child care workers to meet demand, which means availability remains very limited.
Most of the states that have implemented—or are considering implementing—universal child care usually only focus on infant to preschool ages. Vermont expanded its child care subsidies, but it’s income-based and focused on early childhood education. Washington State’s Fair Start for Kids Act covers some school-age care, but it’s not universal, and like New Mexico, summer care depends on provider availability. Massachusetts is considering a universal child care system but it will focus again on early childhood.
San Diego Unified School District expanded their free full-day summer programming for kindergarten to sixth grade students this year. Unlike many other free programs, students are guaranteed a spot for free, although it’s more like summer school than it is like camp, and it only runs for half of the summer.
Will the U.S. ever have free summer camp?
The problem is clear: The summer camp solutions are a patchwork at best and leave most families without affordable child care for three months a year. A national universal policy would be the best answer. But is it even realistic?
The main source of funding for summer care comes from the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), which is allocated at a state level to serve low income families. States have discretion in how to use their funding, and about a third of children served by CCDBG are school-aged. Still, it’s not nearly enough funding to help the families who need it most, says Elliot Haspel, child care policy expert and author.
“The total funding is $10 billion—it would need to be closer to $60 billion a year just to ensure all eligible families could receive aid,” Haspel says. “And that’s without making the reimbursement rate high enough to ensure good compensation and a stable workforce.”
The other source of funding for summer care is the 21st Century Community Learning Center Act, which currently has $1.3 billion in federal appropriations. Trump’s 2027 budget proposal wants to eliminate that funding.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) introduced the Summer for All Act in 2023, which would put $1 billion a year to expand access to free or low-cost summer programs for school-aged kids, but the legislation hasn’t gone anywhere since it was introduced.
“Much like early child care, government support of summer care has long been treated in a problematic welfare framework,” Haspel says. The political will just isn’t there. “The bulk of parents and policymakers seem to just shrug and accept how awful finding and affording summer care is, as opposed to organizing a mass movement demanding a change.”
Is there any hope? Haspel dreams of a two-pronged solution where cities and school districts partner with community-based organizations to offer universal summer care options that are free for low- and moderate-income families and capped at an affordable rate for higher-income families.
“This would allow cities to leverage existing infrastructure rather than building a new system from scratch,” he says.
A partnership like this doesn’t mean that summer care has to just be summer school, Haspel explains. There should be vouchers available giving families in low- and middle-income brackets access to specialty camps. Local governments could model it after an existing camp-school partnership project, which currently has philanthropic funding to award grants to nonprofit camps to build their capacity.
Sounds pretty dreamy.
Meaningful, scalable change, however, isn’t likely to happen until parents turn this annual pain point into a loud demand for change. “The first politician who runs on the platform of fixing summer care is going to have a legion of parents willing to do anything for them,” Haspel says.
They’ve certainly got my vote.
Support for this reporting came from the Better Life Lab at New America.
Kathleen Davis is a freelance writer, editor, and editorial strategist. Previously she was the deputy editor at Fast Company and host and creator of the award-nominated podcast “The New Way We Work.”
