First, What Did SB 462 Actually Do?
Before getting into what SB 462 has and has not accomplished, it helps to start with the basics.
Texas Senate Bill 462 was filed on November 22, 2024, and went into effect on September 1, 2025. The law requires Texas Child Care Services (CCS) to give eligible children of qualifying child-care workers priority placement on subsidy waitlists.
What SB 462 does not do is guarantee that a child-care worker will receive assistance when they need it. Instead, it moves eligible children into a higher-priority category so they can receive available funding before families in lower-priority groups.
And Why Was This Needed?
Now the question is WHY? What research, what knowledge, what discovery prompted someone to say, “Childcare providers need a priority listing for childcare tuition assistance funding?”
The House Committee on Trade, Workforce & Economic Development has the answer, and the answer was: dedicated, professional early childhood educators couldn’t find affordable child care for their own children while working in the childcare industry. This has been leading to high turnover rates and creating a childcare crisis (House Committee on Trade, Workforce & Economic Development, 2025). Furthermore, they stated that the childcare industry is the backbone of our society and called this whole situation ironic.
I love living in irony.
During an interim hearing, it was established that there was a goal to “make a meaningful change within existing resources” (Senate Research Center, 2025).
So, we identified that child-care workers cannot reliably access affordable child care. We identified that this contributes to turnover. We identified that child care is essential to the workforce and economy.
And then we identified a solution that required no additional resources.
I don’t know, but I don’t see this going very well.
The Numbers Are Not In Agreement
n the North Texas area, the childcare assistance waitlist is 36 months. Many other large workforce areas are facing waitlists measured in years, not weeks.
The average tuition rate for an infant is $218 per week (some of us are in locations that are a lot higher—my facility charges $320.00 up to 12 months of age). The average childcare provider in Texas, according to TWC, earns $11.43 per hour. Infant care alone would take 48% of the childcare provider’s weekly gross income.
A toddler is $210, and a preschool-aged child is roughly $197.00. We are not getting much further from that 48% of gross income, and we’ve JUST reached the North Texas waiting-list threshold for a childcare provider.
The numbers are telling me that these workers can’t afford to wait. You can’t retain someone who can’t earn enough to maintain the basic needs of their family.
Priority Did Not Create Affordability
And this is where I struggle to understand what SB 462 was supposed to accomplish in practice.
SB 462 addresses the order in which funding is distributed, but it doesn’t necessarily address whether enough funding exists for that worker to receive help when she actually needs it. The law itself requires a priority position; it doesn’t promise immediate service.
The problem wasn’t the position that an early childhood educator had in the queue. It was the lack of affordability in the very service they provide. The lack of funding to assist. The priority change didn’t change the financial situation or the limited resources.
The retention plan for early childhood educators was, “get them a little closer to the top of an already heavy list” and hope, at the very best, they are okay spending at least the next 12 months bringing home roughly 54% of their gross income while meeting endlessly “higher quality” program demands.
A Piece of Paper In The Rain
If someone tells you they’re standing in the rain because they don’t have shelter, handing them a piece of paper technically gives them something to put over their head. It doesn’t mean you’ve solved the shelter problem.
A 2025 study in North Texas showed an annual turnover rate of 52% (Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center, 2025).
Has SB 462 made changes and helped some Texas early childhood educators with their childcare expenses? Yes. But did it really bring meaningful change using those “existing resources”? Was affordability or retention truly addressed?
Did we strengthen the “backbone”… or did we give it a piece of paper to stand in the rain?
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