You’ve got open seats you can’t fill, and almost every article you find tells you to market harder.
That advice assumes families haven’t heard of you. When NAEYC asked nearly 10,000 educators in January 2025 why they were enrolled below the level they wanted, only 7% said demand was weak. We went through the rest of those numbers in our post on why centers sit half empty.
So here are seven ways to increase enrollment, ordered by how close each family already is to you. The ones near the top cost nothing but attention.
1. Start with the seats you can actually staff
Licensed capacity is a building number. What you can sell is a staffing number, and the two are rarely the same.
The Urban Institute looked at 763 Louisiana centers through their January 2022 grant applications, roughly 90% of the subsidized centers there. Among centers paying lead teachers around $8.50 an hour, 55% had closed a classroom and 70% had turned families away. Among centers paying about $15, it was 47% and 59%. Better pay helped. It didn’t solve it.
One state, four years ago, so read it as a direction rather than a rule. The lesson still stands. Before you spend a dollar on marketing, write down how many children each room could take tomorrow with the staff already on your payroll. That’s the number you can sell.
2. Call the families who already went quiet
Every center has them. A parent called in March, got a reply, said they’d think about it, and you never heard back.
You’ll see conversion benchmarks quoted for this. Every one we could find came from a company selling enrollment software, drawn from its own customers. There’s no independent research on it. So skip their number and run your own count.
Pull twelve months of inquiries. Mark each one enrolled, said no, or went quiet. At most centers that third pile is longer than the list of empty seats, so the families who could fill your rooms have already found you once.
Then call them. Not an email. One question: did you find care? Some did. Some are in something that is not working.
3. Confirm your waitlist before you trust it
A waitlist tells you who was looking. It doesn’t tell you who’s still waiting.
Washington DC’s education office added up the waitlists from its 2019-20 school lottery, which includes preschool. The lists came to 54,183 entries. Those entries were 15,661 actual children. Adding the lists together overstated demand by about three and a half times, in a system where a family could apply to no more than 12 schools. The city’s charter board found the same pattern: 17,047 entries, 7,822 children.
Lists also go stale quickly. Massachusetts ran one confirmation round on its subsidy waiting list, a letter and two phone calls with 30 days to reply. In four months the list fell from 41,028 to 27,593. That’s a subsidy list, so some of those families moved or never got the letter. Read it as a list going stale, not as parents being flaky.
Confirm yours by phone every 60 days. Ask if they still need care and which month. A short list you believe is worth more than a long one you don’t.
4. Sell hours, not seats
Here’s a piece of arithmetic worth doing on your own rate card.
If your part-time rate is more than half your full-time rate, two part-time families sharing one licensed seat bring in more than one full-time family. At 60% of full-time each, that seat earns 120% of what it earns today.
It only works if the schedules don’t overlap, your ratio holds on every single day, and somebody is tracking who is in on Tuesday. That’s real admin, and it’s why most centers stay full-time only.
Families who need Tuesday and Thursday, or 7am to 1pm, are demand you’re currently turning down.
5. Make it possible for subsidy families to say yes
Affordability is the reason directors give most often for empty seats, and you can’t fix it by cutting tuition.
What you can change is how many families are able to pay your rate. Find out what your state’s subsidy program pays, how quickly it pays, and whether it pays on enrollment or on attendance. That last one moves more money than most directors expect, and we wrote about it on its own.
Then decide how many slots you’re willing to hold for subsidy families, and say so plainly on your website. Families looking for a provider who takes their voucher have to guess right now.
6. Plan the age-up moves before they happen
Room transitions run on birthdays, so you can see them coming months ahead. Every time a child moves up, a seat opens behind them.
Once a quarter, list every child who’ll age into the next room and the date it happens. Then work backwards. An infant seat opening in November means you start touring for it in September, not the week it goes empty.
This is the cheapest move on the list, and it’s the one most centers do from memory.
7. Be findable where families actually look
Researchers at OPRE interviewed 94 parents across six places, including New Hampshire, and published what they heard in February 2025. Parents layer sources they already trust. Family and other parents first, then Google reviews, Facebook, Yelp, Google Maps and state websites. Visiting in person was the step they called most useful. Parents in cities searched online more. Parents in rural areas drove around.
That’s 94 parents talking, not a national survey, so treat it as texture rather than percentages.
The practical version’s short. Claim your Google Business Profile and put real hours, real photos and the ages you serve on it. Ask the families who already love you to leave a review, because almost none of them will think of it unprompted. Reply to every review, including the unkind one.
The order matters more than the list
Six of these seven cost you attention and nothing else. The seventh, paying enough to keep a room staffed, is the one that sets the ceiling for the other six. You can run a perfect follow-up process straight into a classroom you can’t open.
Start by knowing which seats are really open
All seven begin from the same two numbers: how many seats you’re licensed for, and how many you can staff this week. Most centers keep the first in a licensing file and the second in the director’s head.
ChildcareWow puts enrollment and occupancy by room against licensed capacity, with staff scheduling next to it, so both numbers sit on one screen. It won’t hire your teacher and it won’t lower a family’s tuition. It will stop you marketing a room you can’t open, and stop you sitting on a seat you didn’t know was free.
We built it because we run centers too.
Book a 20-minute walkthrough(https://booking.childcarewow.com/#/Demo). We’ll set up occupancy by room and show you which of your seats are open right now.
SOURCES
• Urban Institute, Child Care Centers That Pay Their Teachers More Are Less Likely to Have Staffing Challenges (Louisiana, n=763, Jan 2022 Teacher Support Grant applications) — https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/LA-CSRE_Child_Care_Centers_That_Pay_Their_Teachers_More_Are_Less_Likely_to_Have_Staffing_Challenges.pdf
• NAEYC, state survey briefs, January 2025 wave (n=9,883 early childhood educators) — https://www.naeyc.org/about-us/news/press-releases/survey-childcare-affordability-crisis
• DC Deputy Mayor for Education, Public School Lottery Waitlists Explained, Part 2, EdSight #7, Jan 2020 (SY2019-20: 54,183 entries = 15,661 unique students) — https://dme.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dme/publication/attachments/DME_EdSight%20Waitlist%20Part%202%20FINAL_01.07.20.pdf
• DC Public Charter School Board, SY21-22 lottery results and waitlist data (17,047 entries = 7,822 students) — https://dcpcsb.org/sy-21-22-lottery-results-and-waitlist-data
• Bouek, J. (2023), The Wait List as Redistributive Policy, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal 9(5):76-97, DOI 10.7758/RSF.2023.9.5.04 (Massachusetts EEC: 41,028 to 27,593 in four months)
• Betancur, Jimenez Parra & Sandstrom, Parents' Experiences in Searching for and Selecting Child Care and Early Education: A Multi-Site Qualitative Study, OPRE, Feb 2025 (n=94 parents, 6 sites) — https://www.norc.org/content/dam/norc-org/pdf2025/parents-experiences-with-searching-feb25.pdf
