A majority of New York City’s infants and toddlers who are income-eligible to receive subsidized child care aren’t enrolled in programs even as the affordability crisis pushes more families to flee the city, a report found.

More than 146,000 city children are missing out on the affordable care they’re qualified to receive as 80% of families across the boroughs can’t afford to pay for it, the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York found in its wide-ranging biennial report on children.

The report released on Wednesday found that more than 120,000 children under 5 are served in public early care and education programs, but many families are still competing for seats in child care programs even where a number of options are available, while other caretakers say what’s offered doesn’t meet their needs as working parents.

The report comes as city officials are embroiled in a fight over proposed cuts to early childhood education in the city budget. While Mayor Eric Adams restored some of the rollbacks to 3-K and pre-K programs, some councilmembers and education advocates are pushing for full restoration and asking the state and federal governments to increase their investments.

“When we think about the affordability crisis in the city of New York, the dynamism and diversity of the city of New York, we think that the ability of the city to stand up and sustain high quality, free and affordable early education is essential to our ability to have low-income working middle-class families remain here,” said Jennifer March, executive director of the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York, which advocates for children and families.

The report also found that even in neighborhoods with the most offerings of child care programs, there are up to four children for every available seat, showcasing how demand is far outpacing available resources. That includes areas like Staten Island’s North Shore, parts of central and south Brooklyn, and northern Manhattan and the Bronx.

While the city has dramatically grown its early childhood education programming in the last few years by making pre-K and 3-K programs for 3- and 4-year-olds universally available, there are still barriers for low-income families trying to access affordable services.

March said that dried-up outreach efforts by the city, an enrollment system that is particularly confusing for families seeking subsidized programs, and ongoing post-pandemic health and safety fears are partly driving that divide.

“While the early stages of robust outreach and engagement that made universal pre-K possible, those staff and outreach teams largely are nonexistent today,” March said.

She added, “there are multiple ways into these programs. So there’s a little bit of a bureaucratic nightmare.”

City Hall spokesperson Amaris Cockfield said the city’s early childhood system is serving more children than ever before under the Adams administration and making investments to lower costs for working families.

“We are delivering breakthroughs like MyCity to help families sign up for child care online, investing billions of dollars in early child care, and shifting thousands of seats across the city to immediately meet demand and expand access for families, and we are committed to ensuring that every child who needs a seat has access to one in our city. We look forward to building on this work and supporting this industry through the budget process,” she said.

The report additionally found that child care programs offering year-round care and for longer hours each day have declined while programs offering care only during the school year and for six hours a day have increased.

“That’s not realistic for working parents because they need care year-round,” said Rimsha Khan, a Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York research associate who worked on the report.

The data also show that high-income families are much more reliant on private child care than families in other income brackets. For high-income earners, 38% of their 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled in private child care programs and about a third were in public programs. Lower-income families were more than 40% reliant on public programs, with 16% of middle-income and 16% of families in poverty enrolling their children in private programs.

“If they don’t get into the public system, they’re kind of out of luck and out of options,” Khan said. “Working-class families, middle-class families, they can’t afford child care on the private market.”

The 80th percentile of families pay between $14,000 and $20,000 a year for care for a child 5 years old or younger, reports show.

The CCC report found that families on average are spending 18%-23% of their incomes on infant or toddler care. That figure nearly doubles for single parents, who spend between 33%-41% of their household earnings on care. Fewer than 1 in 10 single parents can afford care at market-rate prices, the report said.

Those affordability rates are most severe in Mott Haven, Hunts Point and University Heights, where fewer than 1% of families can afford care, compared to the 70% of families who can afford care in neighborhoods like Battery Park and Greenwich Village.

March said that more state and federal funding is needed across the board, but particularly for infant and toddler programs and that the city needs to better engage parents to make sure already funded 3-K seats are filled.

“There really needs to be a concerted effort to create a more consumer-centered approach to engaging people year-round. So that applications and enrollment can be easy to understand and really timely executed,” she said.