Across the country, a quiet but critical piece of child care infrastructure has been hiding in plain sight: state child care finders. The Hunt Institute’s new National Child Care Finder Scale pulls them into the spotlight and, for the first time, shows how well they’re actually working for families.
According to the data, 2 states using Wonderschool Finder ranked No. 1 and No. 2 consecutively. Our care finders in Florida and New Mexico have set the bar for what exceptional search tools should and can deliver.
The report looks at verified child care finders in all 50 states and D.C., scoring them on four dimensions: Design & Integration, User Experience, Search Filters, and Provider Profiles. The goal is simple but powerful: give state leaders a clear, actionable roadmap to make these platforms truly work for families.
The headline from The Hunt Institute is encouraging but clear-eyed:
“States have built “reasonable access” through their finders, but there are significant gaps in real-time availability, provider details, and searchability.”
On the 20-point scale, states fell into one offour categories:
Key findings from the new analysis:
For us at Wonderschool, it’s especially meaningful that Florida and New Mexico are highlighted as national leaders, because we’ve had the honor of partnering with both states on the technology that powers their child care finders and broader access infrastructure.
In fact, they were marked as the top performing states, which we’re deeply proud of.
“We’re focused on making Universal Child Care real for New Mexico families—easy to understand, easy to access, and built around family choice,” said Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky, of the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department. “By partnering with Wonderschool on a unified portal where families can search and apply for child care in one place, we’re removing barriers that have made finding early care and education harder than it should be. We appreciate The Hunt Institute for lifting up this work.”
One of my favorite parts of this work is that it doesn’t just rely on policy theory. The Hunt Institute grounded the scale in interviews with 40 parents across 17 states. Their feedback shaped the framework and surfaced two big priorities:
For me, that’s the definition of infrastructure done right: not just meeting a federal requirement, but aligning with what families actually need on a Tuesday night when they’re searching on their phone between shifts.
The new analysis doesn’t stop at scoring. It lays out concrete policy considerations for state agencies and legislators who want to move from “Adequate” or “Enhanced” into “Exemplary”:
As Dr. Javaid Siddiqi puts it, a child care finder is “more than just a website; it is a lifeline.” And as Dr. Pritha Gopalan notes, nearly two-thirds of states offer basic filters, but only about one-third offer the richer filters families prefer, a “low-cost, high-impact” opportunity for improvement.
The “Exemplary” rating for Florida and New Mexico isn’t theoretical: it reflects real tools that families and providers are using every day.
In New Mexico, the state’s Child Care Finder, built on the Wonderschool platform, allows families to search 1,000+ programs statewide, filtering by: proximity, age, quality rating, tuition, language, and program type. Data flows from the state’s provider database into family-friendly profiles that providers can claim and enhance with photos, program details, and more.
In Florida, the state’s integrated search experience helps families navigate a complex landscape of licensed providers, Gold Seal quality designations, and pre-K options — with Wonderschool technology surfacing this information in a more transparent, navigable way at scale.
These states are showing what happens when you combine:
At Wonderschool, our strategy is built around the exact needs The Hunt Institute is surfacing in this report.
For state and local governments, Wonderschool for Governments offers tools and data to:
Our configurable, multilingual Child Care Finder is built specifically for state systems. It provides:
Because we also power a national marketplace and a child care management system, we can connect the dots between:
And with Wonderschool Oversight, we help states protect public dollars by detecting potential subsidy fraud early, without disrupting access for families or overwhelming providers. That’s increasingly important as more states expand eligibility and invest heavily in early childhood.
The National Child Care Finder Scale is more than a ranking. It’s an invitation for states to:
If you’re a state or local leader looking at your rating and wondering what it would take to move up the scale, or to design an Exemplary finder from the ground up, my team and I would love to talk.
Families are already doing the hard work of raising young children.
Our systems should make finding child care the easiest part of that journey.
Find a child care program that meets your needs from thousands of listings using our Child Care Finder. If you're a provider, create a listing to get discovered by families near you!