Child care centers on Google: the 2026 benchmark report
Review counts, ratings, website presence and hours for 64,363 child care centers and daycares, computed from public Google Business Profile listings across 51 states.
Reviews
| Review count | Value |
|---|---|
| Median | 6 |
| Average (mean) | 16.9 |
| 25th percentile | 1 |
| 75th percentile | 19 |
| 90th percentile | 42 |
Share of child care centers and daycares by review count:
| Bucket | Share of listings |
|---|---|
| 0 reviews | 17.9% |
| Under 10 | 58.6% |
| Under 25 | 80.6% |
| 100 or more | 2.1% |
| 500 or more | 0.1% |
Ratings
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Average rating | 4.5 |
| Rated 5.0 | 40.6% |
| Rated 4.5 or higher | 65.8% |
| Rated under 4.0 | 15.6% |
| No rating yet | 16% |
Websites
| Website status | Share |
|---|---|
| Website listed | 66.8% |
| No website listed | 33.2% |
| Own domain | 63% |
| Social profile only | 2.5% |
| Free or DIY builder | 1.3% |
Median review count for child care centers and daycares with a website: 10. Without one: 2.
Profile completeness and hours
| Profile field | Share |
|---|---|
| Has a profile photo | 95.9% |
| Public email on profile | 25.4% |
| Open 24 hours | 2.7% |
| Open Saturday | 7.5% |
| Open Sunday | 5% |
| No hours listed | 18.4% |
Where the listings are
| State | Listings |
|---|---|
| CA | 6,997 |
| FL | 3,961 |
| NY | 3,778 |
| TX | 3,044 |
| MA | 2,605 |
| IL | 2,598 |
| GA | 2,551 |
| NJ | 2,365 |
| MD | 2,289 |
| OH | 2,283 |
| PA | 2,280 |
| WA | 2,060 |
Primary categories
| Google category | Listings |
|---|---|
| Day care center | 32,317 |
| Preschool | 16,322 |
| Child care agency | 8,694 |
| Family day care service | 3,339 |
| Adult day care center | 1,128 |
| Dog day care center | 998 |
| Montessori preschool | 305 |
| After school program | 257 |
The bar in this niche is lower than you think
Half of all child care centers on Google have 6 reviews or fewer. Not fifty. Not twenty. 6. Compare that with home services, where the median company sits in the twenties and the map-pack winners run past three hundred, and you get the defining fact about marketing a daycare: almost nobody in your category is trying.
17.9% of centers have no reviews at all. 58.6% have fewer than ten. 80.6% have fewer than twenty-five. The 75th percentile is 19 reviews and the 90th is 42. Read that again: forty-two reviews puts a center in the top tenth of the country. A director who asks every graduating family and every parent at the six-month mark can get there in a year without spending a dollar.
Ignore the mean of 16.9. It is dragged upward by a handful of large franchised locations and national chains. The percentiles are what a parent in your zip code experiences.
Ratings are table stakes, counts are the differentiator
The average rating across the dataset is 4.5 stars, and 65.8% of centers sit at 4.5 or better. 40.6% show a perfect 5.0, which sounds impressive until you realize most of those are 5.0 on three reviews. Parents have learned to read that. A center at 4.8 with sixty reviews reads as real. A center at 5.0 with two reads as the owner's cousin.
The number that should worry you is 15.6%. That is the share of centers below 4.0, and in child care a sub-4.0 rating is not a minor blemish. It is the end of the shortlist. Parents forgive a plumber a bad week. They do not gamble on it with an eighteen-month-old.
Another 16% of listings carry no rating at all. An unrated center is invisible in the comparison a parent is running across four browser tabs.
The website gap is the widest opening on the board
33.2% of child care listings link to no website. Centers with a site have a median of 10 reviews. Centers without one have 2. That is a five-fold difference in visible social proof.
We are not claiming the website produces the reviews. Centers that run themselves professionally tend to do both. But the correlation is strong enough to be useful in two directions. If a competitor in your area has no website, they are not going to outwork you online. If that competitor is you, this is the single cheapest gap to close, because a parent comparing centers at 10pm needs your license number, your ratios, your hours, your tuition range and a tour button, and a Google listing alone gives them none of it.
Hours, photos and the questions your profile does not answer
18.4% of centers list no hours on their Google profile. For a business whose entire value proposition is a schedule a working parent can rely on, that is a strange thing to leave blank. Only 7.5% show Saturday hours and 5% show Sunday, so if you serve shift workers, nurses or restaurant staff, saying so puts you in a very small field.
95.9% have at least one photo, so photos are not an advantage, they are an expectation. What is still rare is a photo set that shows the actual rooms, the playground, the daily schedule board and the staff, all without a single identifiable child who lacks written parental consent.
Only 25.4% publish an email address. Parents researching at night want a way to ask a question that is not a phone call during class hours.
What to do with this
- Pull your own numbers. Open your Google Business Profile and write down your review count, your star rating, whether a website is linked, and whether your hours are complete.
- Place yourself honestly. Under 6 reviews is the bottom half. Under 19 is the bottom three quarters. 42 and above is the top tenth nationally.
- If you are in the 33.2% with no website, fix that before anything else. Five pages, license number, tuition range, tour request form, mobile tap-to-call. See the website guide.
- Start a standing review ask: every family at the thirty-day mark, every family at graduation, every parent who says something kind at pickup. The reviews guide has the exact wording.
- Complete the profile: real hours including any early-drop or late-pickup windows, a public email, license number in the description, and twenty photos with no identifiable children unless consent is on file. The profile guide has the field-by-field version.
- Fix the phone before you buy traffic. Most centers cannot answer during ratio hours, and a parent who reaches voicemail books a tour somewhere else. Run your tuition through the calculator, then read the missed calls guide.
Method
This report aggregates 64,363 public Google Business Profile listings collected from Google Maps searches for child care centers and daycares across every US state, deduplicated by place. Review counts and ratings are as displayed on the listing at collection time. "Website listed" means the profile links to any URL; we classify the URL as an owned domain, a social profile, or a free site builder by hostname. Figures are refreshed monthly. Cite this page as: Daycare Growth Lab, "Child care centers and daycares on Google benchmark report", 2026.