This daycare center business calculator forecasts monthly and annual revenue based on the number of children under your care. This tool will project staffing levels based on your own custom input, estimate monthly expenses, and create a plan that will allow you to attain a profit. Get insights to help your daycare thrive below.
Daycare Facility Calculator
Category Configurations
Rooms
Staff Cost
Monthly Expenses
How to use this calculator
Facility Configuration
- Enter your daycare name. Get creative with it!
- Set your default room limits based on four child categories. The default settings below are customized to adapt to the amount of care children need at different age ranges.
- Infant (8 children)
- Toddler (20 children)
- PreSchool (25 children)
- School Age (25 children)
Daycare revenue by category is projected in this tool.
2. Room Setup
- Flexible room configuration with customizable capacity and option to add or remove rooms.
- Select the child category assignment per room.
- Default setup with 4 rooms targeting different age groups.
Revenue Calculations for each Room in the Tool:
Monthly Children Revenue =
(Room Capacity × % Monthly Children × Monthly Rate × Monthly Hours) +
(Room Capacity × % Hourly Children × Hourly Rate × Weekly Hours × 4.33)
3. Revenue Calculations
Monthly Revenue per Category =
(Number of Children × % Monthly Pay × Monthly Rate × Average Monthly Hours) +
(Number of Children × % Hourly Pay × Hourly Rate × Average Weekly Hours × 4.33)
Staffing Requirements Formula:
Staff Required =
Ceiling(Number of Children ÷ Staff Ratio) × Weekly Operating Hours × 4.33
Monthly Staff Cost:
Monthly Staff Cost =
Staff Required × Hourly Pay Rate × Weekly Operating Hours × 4.33
4. Expense Tracking
Fixed costs tracking including: Facility expenses (rent, utilities), Administrative costs (accounting, advertising), and operational expenses (supplies, software). You can add more or remove custom expenses into the tool based on your needs.
5. Profit Calculation
Monthly Net Profit =
Total Monthly Revenue - (Staff Costs + Total Monthly Expenses)
Then click on the “Calculate Projections” button and you’ll see monthly/annual revenue by child category, required staff count and associated costs, complete expense breakdown, net profit projections, and a bar chart visualization of revenue by child age category.
The Details of Daycare Financial Projections
Following extensive discussions with Adam Hoeksema, an SBA loan program director and co-founder of Projection Hub, we developed this calculator to address the real-world challenges daycare owners face when they’re trying to create an accurate revenue projections in a business plan.
The Revenue Split
During our development sessions, Hoeksema emphasized the importance of adding two revenue streams to the daycare forecasting tool: “Some children could be paying by the hour and then some maybe perhaps you have an option where they just, certain days of the week they stop by for a few hours.” I added monthly and hourly pay input fields based on this suggestion.
Compensate your daycare staff well for all the work they do.
The Staffing Ratio Dance
Through multiple iterations with Hoeksema, we refined the staffing calculations to reflect his experience that proper staffing levels can make or break a daycare’s profitability. “Based on the assumptions and the staff to child ratios that we have above, we’re gonna be able to project how many staff members we’ll need in each room,” said Adam. This guided my implementation of room-by-room staff ratio inputs to adjust to the reality that infants require a whole lot more attention from staff than school-aged children that are more self-sufficient. Of course, this tool allows you to set a maximum number of children under the care of one child care provider.
The Reality Check
Perhaps the most valuable insight from our collaboration was Hoeksema’s emphasis on realistic growth projections: “When you first open, you might not have a full room right off the bat.” Keep in mind that when you start a daycare business that you probably won’t be at full capacity on month one of the business.
You’re also going to experience a certain amount of churn that you need to account for due to children aging out of daycare services or simply moving away. According to Tania Gray at EnrolNow, a typical monthly churn rate at a childcare center is 8%. I always like to be conservative with your early business projections as you get the word out about your service in the community.
The Bottom Line
Working directly with Hoeksema allowed me to incorporate more than a decade of real-world daycare financing experience into this calculator. His expertise, drawn from reviewing over a hundred daycare financial projections and business plans during his tenure at the SBA loan program, helped ensure this calculator addresses the actual challenges daycare owners face, not just theoretical scenarios.
About the Author: Brett Lindenberg
