ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Like many families, Jessica and Adrian Garcia, who live in the mountain resort town of Ruidoso, had to cobble together different child care options for their son when they returned to work after his birth in 2023.
In August 2021, New Mexico expanded subsidized free child care to households earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line — at the time, $87,840 for a family of three. The Garcias earned too much to qualify.
Jessica, who works at the local branch of Eastern New Mexico University, and Adrian, a police officer, settled for a part-time day care schedule two days a week that cost $300 a month for their son to attend daycare two days a week because they couldn’t afford full-time hours. Jessica’s mother also pitched in to help. At the time, Adrian had to bargain constantly with his boss to juggle graveyard shifts and child care, and if his schedule changed, his wife and mother-in-law both had to rearrange their own work on short notice to accommodate his.
Before long, Jessica received an ultimatum from her job: If she couldn’t work full-time hours consistently, she would be demoted to a part-time position and lose the family’s health insurance benefits.
Their luck turned last November when New Mexico became the first state in the country to launch free, universal child care for children from birth through age 13, regardless of household income. The expansion to a truly universal program “was just a big blessing to us,” said Jessica, who was able to enroll her son in full-time care. “It’s been a huge help.”
New Mexico garnered a wave of attention when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in September that all of the state’s families would be eligible for child care assistance. “Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” she said at the time.
In March 2026, requirements for the program shifted. Families earning up to 600 percent of the federal poverty line are now eligible for free child care without copays, the equivalent of a four-person family earning $198,000 annually. Copays beyond that threshold are also contingent on if the price of oil decreases. Participating families can choose from a wide range of options, including center-based care, home-based providers, before- and after-school care, and faith-based centers. On average, the universal program is expected to save participating families $12,000 a year. (Private providers still have the option to not serve families receiving child care assistance and continue to charge tuition.)
What has received less attention outside New Mexico, however, is the state’s attempt to fairly compensate the long underappreciated and underpaid early childhood workforce.
Because the state is now in charge of early education through the universal program, it has also stepped into the role of being responsible for child care wages. It has had to decide questions such as how to weigh experience against education in child care wages, how to financially incentivize centers to adopt rigorous measures of quality and a whole host of issues that have typically been left to the market.
But the child care “market,” as it currently exists in other states, has primarily produced poverty wages for workers and exorbitant costs for families. There’s a hope that if New Mexico can iron out these issues, it can lead the way for other places that might want to implement a universal program, such as New York City. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced earlier this year that the city will create 2,000 free child care slots for 2-year-olds in the city on its way to scaling up a universal and free program for all young children, but the city would need 30,000 new child care workers to make that work.
New Mexico has currently set aside $60 million for increased wages for the state’s child care workforce. A working group is now refining a “wage scale and career lattice framework” intended to support experience, education and quality.
“It’s so exciting to see New Mexico grapple with these questions,” said Lena Bilik, a senior program manager at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank that advocates for universal child care. “Other countries have realized this is a place where the government has to step in. If you’re going to expand your system, you can’t do it without increasing wages. That’s starting to be a bigger conversation.”
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
Child care providers and advocates in the state have different opinions about the efforts thus far.
Barbara Luna Tedrow, a child care center owner in Farmington, first opened her business, A Gold Star Academy, over 25 years ago with 60 children and 10 staff members. Farmington is oil and gas country surrounded by badlands and grayish sands. It’s also just outside of Navajo Nation, making it a border town with a significant Native American population.
Around 2012, Tedrow was approached by an oil field worker — New Mexico is the nation’s second-largest producer of oil — who offered to finance the construction of a second child care center. Over the next decade, grant funding and solid relationships with city officials helped her expand to five branches. Now, her team cares for 700 children, with 400 of those slots opened up in the past three years alone. Part of her success, she said, is because she worked to advocate for child care as a means of complementing oil and gas jobs.
“If you want cities to flourish, they need high-quality child care,” she said. “All of these new employees want to go to work, but they can’t without it.”
Tedrow’s employees receive medical, vision and dental insurance as well as a 401(k) retirement program, which together cost $15,000 per employee on top of their salary. Therefore, Tedrow said she worries about what might happen if state reimbursement rates decline in the future or if the state increases the minimum wage for employees without increasing the state reimbursement along with it.
“We’re dependent on the state for wages, benefits and everything else to run a high-quality child care center,” she said.
Mirna Polendo, the director of Imagination Station, a Christian preschool in the mountain resort town of Ruidoso, made some changes to her program when the state moved to a universal system. New Mexico pays enhanced rates to centers that are open at least 10 hours a day and that pay increased wages to teachers. Polendo extended her hours from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and bumped employee wages to $17 an hour to qualify for more state reimbursement.
In return, Polendo receives $1,400 per month from the state to care for an 18-month-old infant, $1,075 for a toddler and $890 for kids ages 3 to 5. Across the board, the state reimburses more for care than private tuition ever did.
If her center meets certain quality measures, the state reimbursements could be even higher. But one of those quality measures would require her to bump staff wages up to $18 an hour. That is right on the borderline of what Polendo can afford to pay staff while remaining in the black, she said — “I can’t do higher than that.”
Olga Grays, a home daycare provider in Las Cruces, has worked as an early childhood educator for 20 years and is licensed to care for up to 12 kids at a time in her home. In her backyard and garden area, vibrant streams of papel picado — colored paper with intricate perforated designs — are taped up across the shaded patio. Colorful play structures and swings are a few steps away. The setup feels so personal, which Grays credits to the nature of the business.
“Home daycares have this connection with parents that a lot of centers can’t,” she said. Some days, Grays opens up at 4 a.m. to accommodate a family, and closes as late as 11 p.m.
Grays has to pay her employees $16 an hour to accept state subsidies and has chosen at this time not to make the changes to her business that would unlock larger reimbursement from the state.
“I’d rather spend my time in daycare with children providing the services they need,” she said. “I don’t believe that taking the time out to do that paperwork will help them.”
But that means that any of her employees could leave for another center that is paying more, she said. She supports linking wages to years of experience and educational attainments instead of focusing solely on a center’s quality metrics.
While the work that remains is complex, that should not overshadow the years of effort and advocacy that it took for the state to reach this point, said Jacob Vigil, the chief legislative officer for New Mexico Voices for Children, a state advocacy group.
“It took over a decade for us to get here,” Vigil said. “It was a campaign that was broad based and that had a diverse base of folks that really understood and coalesced around the messaging of why early childhood is important.”
Contact editor Christina Samuels at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingerreport.org
This story about universal child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
