About 26,000 children are waiting for childcare assistance in Oregon, and not a single family outside priority groups has come off the list in nearly three years.
Not all may ultimately be eligible, but for working parents across Washington County, including Beaverton, the frozen waitlist means choosing between paychecks and care for their kids.
Oregon's waitlist feeds into the Employment-Related Day Care program, a subsidy for working families earning up to 200% of the federal poverty level. The state created the waitlist in 2023. Families in the child welfare system can bypass it, but for everyone else the line hasn't moved.
"Oregon really has chosen to focus on maintaining that quality of programming that works well for providers and families by keeping those copays low, paying providers well," Alyssa Chatterjee, director of Oregon's Department of Early Learning and Care, told OPB. "That means we have to serve fewer families with the resources available."
Oregon keeps family co-payments between 2% and 4% of household income and pays providers rates that can exceed $2,000 per month for infant care in the Portland metro area, according to DELC's published rate schedule. The tradeoff: fewer slots to go around.
Washington County: a childcare desert
The squeeze hits close to home.
Washington County has just 21.8 licensed childcare slots for every 100 children under 13, according to a Hillsboro News-Times analysis of the Ford Family Foundation's 2025 Oregon by the Numbers report. That qualifies the county as a childcare desert. All 36 Oregon counties carry the same designation.
A 2023 county report found that available care does not meet local families' needs and projected the county must nearly double its infant-to-5 capacity by 2030.
The gap falls hardest on immigrant and low-income communities. Majority-Hispanic and Latino communities nationally experience the highest childcare desert rate at 52.2%, well above the 45.9% national average, according to a Center for American Progress analysis cited in the same Hillsboro News-Times report.
Immigrants make up at least 21% of the childcare workforce nationally.
