Investing in childcare benefits is an investment in your business
By Molly Day
Hotel owners know what workforce instability costs.
A front-desk employee calls at 6 a.m. to say she’s not coming in, and the manager spends the morning covering the desk herself. A housekeeper who’s cleaned the same rooms for six years quietly cuts back from five shifts to three. A beloved supervisor gives notice because the schedule just doesn’t work anymore, and the hotel starts over – posting the job, interviewing, and training someone new to do it half as well for months.
These challenges show up every day as absenteeism, turnover, and lost productivity. What may be less obvious is one of the primary forces driving them: Childcare.
Nationally, nine in 10 parents report that childcare challenges have disrupted their work. New research from Moms First’s National Business Coalition for Childcare, with analysis supported by McKinsey & Company, puts a price tag on the problem: $70 billion annually in lost workforce output due to childcare disruptions.
Roughly 60 percent of that opportunity – up to $45 billion – is concentrated among foundational workers: Employees in shift-based, operationally essential jobs where an absence has an immediate business impact. Few industries understand the importance of these workers better than hospitality.
A hotel cannot operate remotely, and it can’t hand its core work to AI. Someone has to clean the room, welcome the guest, cook the meal – in person and on the clock. That’s what makes hospitality workers foundational; when someone cannot report to work, the impact can ripple across the property, from coworkers covering a shift to the guest experience itself.
These costs add up. Hospitality’s share of the childcare-related opportunity: $1 billion to $2 billion a year, according to the research – money currently being lost to shifts nobody could cover and jobs that had to be refilled from scratch.
The Hidden Cost
For foundational workers, childcare can be particularly difficult to navigate. Many have limited control over their schedules, cannot work remotely, and have schedules outside the traditional 9-to-5 workday – early mornings, overnight shifts, or weekends.
Childcare, by contrast, largely runs on a fixed, weekday, business hours schedule. When a worker’s hours and childcare’s hours don’t match, someone has to absorb the gap, and increasingly, that’s the employer. The research identifies four primary business impacts of childcare disruptions: Absenteeism, employees leaving jobs, workers leaving the labor force altogether, and lost productivity.
And within that workforce, the burden isn’t evenly shared. Women are especially important to this story. Roughly 58 percent to 66 percent of hotel and accommodation staff are female, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and industry reports.
While women and men in the foundational workforce experience childcare disruptions at similar rates, the consequences are often greater for women. Women report approximately 21 percent more childcare-related time absent from work – and 11 percent more days at work but not fully productive – than their male counterparts.
In an industry where women hold most of the essential, guest-facing roles, a cost that falls disproportionately on women is a cost the business absorbs, too.
You Don’t Have to Build a Childcare Center
Recognizing childcare as a business problem raises an obvious question: What can an employer do about it?
Too often, “employer-supported childcare” still conjures a vision of an expensive on-site center. That can be a powerful solution for the right workforce, but it’s only one tool.
Today’s options are far more flexible, including backup care, childcare stipends and reimbursements, reserved spaces with local providers, care navigation, schedule flexibility, and partnerships with community-based providers.
The Foundational Workers Report evaluated 11 employer interventions, from backup care to schedule flexibility to on-site centers, and found every single one delivered a positive return, ranging from roughly 5 percent to 300 percent. The takeaway: Something works. Nearly any serious attempt to address childcare pays for itself.
The harder question is which something. That depends on the specific problem. Is affordability the biggest barrier? Is care unavailable during early morning or evening shifts? Are unexpected breakdowns driving absences? Employers should diagnose their workforce’s actual bottleneck before picking a benefit, not start with a benefit and hope it fits.
Leading hospitality employers are already taking that approach. Since 2022, Hilton has partnered with Wellthy, connecting team members with care coordinators who help solve time-consuming caregiving challenges. That support is paired with more predictable scheduling, shift swapping, and part-time pathways.
Together, these strategies give employees more control over work and care and, as Hilton’s chief human resources officer put it, give them back their “most valuable resource: Their time.” More than 3,500 team members have enrolled in Wellthy, saving a combined 37,000-plus hours.
At Steamboat Ski Resort in Colorado, employee demand helped drive the solution. The resort opened an employer-based childcare center, offering employees priority enrollment and a 20 percent tuition discount. The results are striking: Working parents report roughly 13 fewer absences a year, 90 percent expect to still be working at Steamboat a year from now, and 70 percent say the benefit helps them stay in the workforce.
An on-site center won’t make sense for every employer, but the results demonstrate what can happen when businesses respond directly to their workforce’s childcare challenges.
A Moment for Employer Action
Businesses also have more incentives to act than ever before. Beginning in 2026, the federal Section 45F Employer-Provided Child Care Credit became significantly more generous. The maximum annual credit increased from $150,000 to $500,000 – and up to $600,000 for eligible small businesses – while the percentage of qualifying expenditures covered also increased. Small businesses can also pool resources to build solutions while remaining eligible for the credit.
For hotel owners, these changes make it worth exploring what solutions may now be financially feasible. And in an industry built around people showing up every day, helping employees reliably show up for work isn’t peripheral to workforce strategy. It’s a business imperative.
Molly Day is chief operating officer at Moms First, a national nonprofit fighting for America’s moms. As part of this work, Moms First runs the National Business Coalition for Childcare, a coalition of more than 200 employers championing childcare as an economic imperative.
Image: Mary Long/stock.adobe.com
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