Tiny violins at the ready, please: I am about to spin you a tale of financial misfortune that is steeped in privilege.
Once upon a time in 2017, the government launched “Free Childcare for Working Parents”, a scheme offering parents of pre-schoolers in England 30 hours of free childcare per week, for 38 weeks of the year. Households in which each parent earned between £6,240 (corresponding to 16 hours per week at the national minimum wage in 2017) and £100,000 per year could apply.
Nine years later, successive governments have attempted to tackle stubbornly high childcare costs by expanding the offer further. As of September 2025, parents of babies aged nine months or over became eligible for 30 hours of free term-time childcare. But most requirements remain unchanged.
To meet the threshold, parents must still earn the equivalent of 16 hours per week at the national minimum wage, which these days comes to £10,574.72. And they still can’t earn over £100,000.
While swathes of families are better off thanks to the scheme, for others caught on the wrong side of the thresholds, it has created a financial minefield. Anyone who is studying, job seeking or has been made redundant is ineligible. Eligible parents who are made redundant while receiving childcare, lose this help just when they become worse off and need it even more than when they were employed. Currently, around one million families are locked out because they earn little – or too much.
I am one of those parents. My husband earns more than £100,000. I, however, am a freelance writer with two young kids, so am currently grazing the underbelly of the lower threshold. It is the most uneven our finances have ever been. But, the result is that we pay full whack for our two children to attend nursery.
While couples earning up to £99,999 each – so with a household income of almost £200,000 – can access free childcare, which is a great loophole for them, we get no help because only one of us earns more than £100,000.
New figures from the Department for Education show the number of children being denied government-funded care because of the £100,000 threshold has more than quadrupled since 2018, with between 50,500 and 99,000 children affected in the 2025/26 tax year.
The £100,000 threshold assumes a capacity to independently absorb huge childcare costs that we don’t recognise in our daily financial life. We pay £1,800 per month for two part-time nursery places (and we’re not in the South East). We are in the early years of our mortgage and have gas and electricity bills that seem increasingly ridiculous, just like everybody else. We have cut back on most of the non-essentials we can think of. We’re relying on savings to help pay for childcare.
A major issue for our family is that the free hours are not, in fact, free. The government scheme is underfunded, meaning most providers have to claw back the shortfall in other ways, often by raising their normal hourly rate. These increases are felt keenly by those of us who pay full price.
Politicians know that high earners are unlikely to garner sympathy among the general public. The average UK salary is £39,039, and some four million children are currently living in poverty. But framing those earning £100,000 as boundlessly wealthy is merely a useful political tactic to distract from the severe ongoing impact of fiscal drag on households at all income levels nationwide.
Back in 2017, £100,000 was more than six times the minimum wage – today it’s four times the minimum wage. Everyone is being squeezed in the middle, while tax and benefits thresholds are frozen. Interestingly, MPs recently raised their salaries to £98,599. Will anything change when they cross the threshold? Or will they, too, be renouncing the free childcare they so badly designed?
‘As a country, we owe it to children to ensure that their parents’ financial situation doesn’t put them at an educational or developmental disadvantage in the early years’ (Photo: standret/Getty)Our nursery bill is becoming untenable, so I’m looking for more stable work so that my husband can divert money into his pension, which would allow us to use the funding. It feels wrong to consider playing the system when we would be happy to contribute, but the way the system is currently designed is forcing our hand.
And what’s the alternative? Admitting defeat and giving up work completely, ignoring the ballooning interest on my student loan debt and losing valuable years of pension contributions?
Pegging childcare thresholds to individual salaries rather than to household income penalises financially unbalanced partnerships like mine. But more importantly, it penalises single-parent households, and that is unjustifiable. And in both cases, it’s mostly women paying the price.
I don’t subscribe to the belief that high earners work the hardest. Most people I know work extremely hard, regardless of their tax band. What is objectively true is that those earning £100,000 pay a much higher proportion of their salaries in tax. Is it fair for them to then be blocked from using the services those taxes help fund?
As a country, we owe it to children to ensure that their parents’ financial situation doesn’t put them at an educational or developmental disadvantage in the early years, and low-earning families and those trapped in poverty must be given access to free childcare for this reason as a priority. But the maths just isn’t working for many parents at the other end of the pay scale, either. The entire policy needs an overhaul.
My generation is always being told not to have children we can’t afford, and the falling birthrate seems to indicate that people are heeding that advice. Sooner or later, that will be everyone’s problem. But right now, thousands of children are missing out on funded childcare because of an unnecessarily punitive and complicated system. For a policy designed to help children develop, and parents (mostly mothers, let’s be honest) get back to work, the Government’s current offer does a remarkably good job of keeping both at home.
*Liane Brady is a pseudonym
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