New Mexico this month marks one year since it became the first state in the nation to offer free childcare to every family, no matter their income. To qualify, families must live in the state, and the adults in the household must be working, looking for work, in school or unable to work.
Many parents say the change has been transformative. Judyn Martinez, who drops her daughter off at Kids Campus, a sought-after center in Santa Fe, told NPR the program made enrollment possible at all. "I'm really grateful for universal childcare because I wouldn't have been able to send her," she said. But it took Martinez about a year and a half to get off the waitlist for Kids Campus, and that list now holds nearly 700 children.
Lilia Doyle, a children's librarian in Santa Fe, said in September that her 2-year-old son was sitting on six different waitlists. "I'm 97th on a multi-hundred person waitlist. I'm 75th on something. And some, I'm not even getting calls back," she said. In October, a center told her it had a spot for her son, but it would not open until August 2027. "I have great belief in this program," Doyle said, "but as it currently stands, I think the rollout needs a lot, a lot of help."
According to the state, New Mexico has about 67,000 children ages 5 and under, and roughly half are enrolled in the universal program. Some other families use free public options such as New Mexico PreK and Head Start, but many children are not in any public program, and officials acknowledged the system must grow. Meeting the need requires overcoming shortages of both childcare workers and slots, challenges also playing out nationally.
The program was made possible in 2022, when voters dedicated part of the state's Land Grant Permanent Fund, built largely on oil and gas taxes and royalties, to early childhood education. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the universal plan in September 2025, it launched Nov. 1 of that year, and the Democrat-majority legislature wrote it into law in March 2026. "We need to keep growing," Lujan Grisham said. "It is not a stagnant set of opportunities." In 2025, the Early Childhood Education and Care Department set a goal of creating 12,000 new spots in the program's first few years and says it is more than halfway there.
The effort carries real costs. The program's operating budget is almost $600 million, and it is projected to run about $50 million over budget this year. A built-in safeguard was recently triggered when the annual Consumer Price Index rose above 3 percent, meaning families earning more than $198,000 for a household of four will soon owe a copayment of no more than $148.50 a month. The state says the change affects about 10 percent of enrolled families and will last through the fiscal year. Republican state Sen. Steve Lanier, whose lawsuit against the initiative failed, remains skeptical: "By calling it universal, all we've done is add the wealthier folks." Catron Allred, who oversees the early childhood center at Santa Fe Community College, counters that early childhood should be treated as a public good, just as no one questions a wealthy family sending children to public school.
Capacity is the central obstacle. Nearly half of all U.S. children ages 5 and under live in a licensed childcare desert, according to the Center for American Progress, and rural areas like much of New Mexico struggle most. Olga Grays, a provider of more than 20 years who runs Mrs. Olga's Daycare out of her Las Cruces home, said she fields daily messages from desperate parents she cannot take. House Speaker Javier Martinez put it bluntly: "It's not a lack of funding, it's a lack of providers."
The rest of the country is watching. Cynthia Osborne, who leads Vanderbilt University's Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center, said New Mexico is "going to provide lessons that the rest of the states are going to have to pay attention to." Oregon, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., New York City and Vermont have all moved toward broader access, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently rolled out free daycare for thousands of 2-year-olds. Emmy Liss, executive director of the city's Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education, said New York is expanding capacity "in parallel" with access rather than opening to everyone at once, adding that her office has learned from New Mexico but that "our realities are different."
For families who have secured spots, the effects ripple outward. Veronica Ramirez of Ohkay Owingeh said enrolling her 2-year-old daughter allowed her to take on more nonprofit work at a birth center serving indigenous clients in Española and to move closer to finishing a bachelor's degree. "Now I'm able to work more and make more money and support my family a little bit better," she said. A new Arizona State University paper found that full-time employment among lower-income mothers in New Mexico has risen 23 percent since universal childcare began. For Doyle, though, full-time work remains on hold until her son gets off a waitlist. "We'll buckle down, and we'll make it through," she said, "but it's not ideal."
