Child care costs more than a mortgage payment or rent almost everywhere in the U.S.: ‘There is no escaping it’

Administrative costs but I imagine insurance and health care costs for those employees. Lack of affordable/open medical care costs are passed on to the customers.

there's a great planet money podcast that covers this

It turns out childcare is just a very labor intensive sector due to the amount of adults needed to watch the kids. This means that most of the costs for daycare are already labor:

In fast food, labor is 25% of the total costs. Estimates for day care - it's, like, more than 70% of total costs.

Given that labor is already a disproportionate amount of the costs, raising salaries a little has a large effect on the increased cost that parents would have to pay.

For some real world numbers, daycare is around 1.3k/month for me. The school does 3 kids to 1 teacher, so that's a max of 3.9k/month of income per 1 teachers salary. So already, in an ideal world where 100% of what parents pay go directly to the teacher, the max they'd make is 48k/year.

Factor in things like renting the facilities, utility costs, administrative and security staff, taxes, etc. and you quickly start to see why even though it seems like parents are paying a lot, there's just not that much money to go around.

All of the money is going to the CEOs and Investors. Every single time. Every single Industry. Stagnant wages is what everyone else experiences because every year the ruling class gets a billion (+) dollar bonus.

Probably also rent for the space in most places, whether they are a home-based business with high mortgage costs, renting space from a corporate landlord, or otherwise exposed to market-rate real estate/rents. If the cost of real estate is high, it impacts the entire economy.