Should You Charge a Deposit to Hold a Daycare Spot?

It is late July. A family toured back in May, loved the infant room, and said yes to a September start. You wrote their name on the September list and stopped worrying about that seat.

You emailed them two weeks ago. Nothing. You emailed again Monday. Still nothing. And now you are doing math on a seat you have been holding since spring for a family that may have found care in June and never thought to tell you.

Almost every director hits this moment, and it is usually the moment they start asking whether they should be taking a deposit.

What a deposit actually buys you

Here is the honest answer, and it is less satisfying than the sales pitch: a deposit buys you information, not certainty.

A family willing to put money behind a start date has made a decision. A family who hesitates is still shopping, and that is worth knowing in July rather than the week before Labor Day. That is the real return. You are not building a fence that keeps families in. You are installing a signal that tells you who is real while you still have time to act on it.

What a deposit will not do is guarantee attendance. People forfeit deposits. Jobs change, a grandparent volunteers, a closer center finally calls. If you set your policy expecting the money to hold families in place, you will be disappointed. Set it expecting the money to sort the decided from the undecided, and it earns its keep.

The seat you are holding has a price tag

Before you can pick a number, you have to know what you are protecting.

By our math, a single empty seat costs a typical center roughly $1,280 a month in lost tuition, and we broke that number down room by room in how much an empty daycare seat actually costs. Nationally, Child Care Aware of America put the average annual price of child care at $13,128 in 2024, which works out to a little over $1,000 a month averaged across ages and care types.

So when you hold an infant seat from June through September for a family that never shows, you did not lose a deposit. You lost a summer. If you want the number for your rooms rather than the national one, run them through the empty seat calculator before you decide what to charge.

Four ways centers structure it

There is no industry-standard deposit, and any article that hands you one number is guessing. What does exist is a handful of structures that show up again and again. Pick the one that matches the problem you actually have.

• A registration or enrollment fee. A modest, non-refundable charge, usually once per family or once per year, that covers the administrative work of enrolling. It is the most common and least controversial option. On its own it does not really hold a future seat. It just makes enrolling feel official.
• A holding deposit. Money attached to a specific start date, credited toward the first month of tuition when the child starts and forfeited if the family walks away. This is the structure that actually addresses the July problem.
• Prepaid first month, or first and last. The strongest commitment and the highest barrier. It works at centers with genuinely long waitlists and real scarcity, and it will screen out good families who are already stretched.
• A refundable deposit with a deadline. Collected at the offer, fully refundable until a stated date, then either applied to tuition or forfeited. It is the gentlest version and the easiest to explain to a nervous parent.

How to pick your number

Two forces pull against each other here. Too small and it filters nobody. Too large and you screen out families who would have been wonderful, and who simply do not have several hundred spare dollars in July, in a country where child care is already one of the largest lines in a household budget.

A workable test: would a family who has genuinely chosen you pay this without resentment, and would a family still shopping three centers hesitate? If the answer to both is yes, your number is about right.

Two more things are worth deciding before a parent asks, not during the conversation:

• Exceptions. Siblings of currently enrolled families, staff children, and families using subsidy are the usual candidates for a waived or reduced deposit. Decide this in advance so you are not improvising case by case and creating a policy you cannot defend later.
• Hardship. One written line about how a family can ask for a payment plan costs you nothing, and it keeps a good family from quietly disappearing because they were too embarrassed to ask.

Put it in writing, and check your state

A deposit policy that lives in your head will eventually become an argument you lose.

Federal consumer guidance aimed at parents is blunt about what a child care contract should spell out: the rate, how often payment is due, any additional fees, acceptable forms of payment, and late fees. Families are being told to look for exactly that, so you may as well be the center that already has it ready.

Some states go further and require it. Arizona, for one, requires that a licensee "conspicuously post a schedule of fees charged for services and the established policy for a refund of fees for services not rendered." Requirements differ from state to state and they change, so check your state's current licensing rules before you finalize anything. Our state licensing and ratio guides are a reasonable starting point, not a substitute for your licensor.

Whatever you write, cover these five things:

1. The amount, and whether it is charged per child or per family.
2. What it applies to: first month of tuition, last month, or nothing at all.
3. Whether it is refundable, and the exact date refundability ends.
4. What happens if the family's start date moves.
5. What happens if you cannot provide the spot you promised.

That last one matters more than directors expect. A policy that keeps a family's money when your own opening slipped is the policy that gets screenshotted into a local parents group. Refund promptly when the failure is yours, say so plainly in the policy itself, and the deposit stops feeling like a gamble to the people being asked to pay it.

When a deposit is the wrong fix

Before you add a deposit, be honest with yourself about why families are disappearing in the first place.

If they are vanishing because they never hear from you between the tour and the start date, a deposit is a tax on your own silence. Families do not ghost the centers that stay in touch. They ghost the ones that went quiet in May and resurfaced in August. We wrote about that pattern in why waitlisted families ghost you, and the fix costs less than any policy change: confirm at the offer, confirm again thirty days out, then confirm two weeks before the start date.

That is also the part worth automating, because it is the part that gets dropped in a busy August. Seedlist checks in with waitlisted families on a schedule you set, asks whether they are still interested, and lets them answer with one click, with no login or password. Families who stop answering get archived instead of quietly occupying a seat in your plan. It is a quieter fix than asking every family for money up front, and often it removes the need to.

Be ready to backfill anyway

Even a well-written deposit policy leaks. Somebody will forfeit, and you will usually find out in the last week of August.

The only real protection is a waitlist current enough to call. For every seat you are holding, know the next two families who fit that room by age and start date, and know they confirmed recently rather than last spring. That is the difference between filling a September seat in a week and staring at it until January, which is roughly when the next wave of families starts looking.

If your held seats live in one spreadsheet and your waitlist lives in another, that is the thing worth fixing before fall rather than after it. Seedlist keeps the whole pipeline in one place: who applied, who toured, who was offered, who confirmed, and who is next in line for each room. It is $59 a month flat, with a 30-day free trial and no credit card to start. Start a free trial and have it running before September.

Frequently Asked Questions