ABSTRACT
As communities implement efforts to strengthen their early care and education (ECE) and home visiting programs and systems, policy makers and community leaders increasingly need tools and methods to accurately estimate the costs of high-quality early childhood and evidence-based home visiting programs. This commentary highlights two tools the federal government developed to understand the true costs of center-based ECE and evidence-based home visiting. This commentary will highlight lessons learned and challenges to collecting cost data that include deciding what costs to collect, comparing costs across programs and models, and the time needed to collect accurate cost data. The commentary ends with a discussion about next steps for both tools.
