Austria’s childcare expansion raises questions over quality and regional spending gaps

Despite increasing childcare places and staff, Austria’s recent expansion shows minimal improvements in daily conditions and ongoing regional funding disparities, prompting calls for improved quality and better resource coordination.

Austria has widened childcare provision over recent years, but the expansion has not been matched by a comparable improvement in the conditions parents and children experience day to day. Figures presented in Vienna on Monday, 7 September, show more places, more groups and more staff, while opening hours and group sizes have shifted only marginally even as the cost to the public sector has climbed steeply.

The study from the Österreichisches Institut für Familienforschung found that between 2016/17 and 2022/23 the number of children in crèches, kindergartens and after-school care rose by about 8%. Over the same period, the number of institutions increased by roughly 5%, the number of groups by 11% and staffing by 9%. Tirol recorded the strongest growth. The sharpest build-out came in crèches, where provision rose from 11.3 groups per 1,000 children under three to 17.5, suggesting that the biggest push has been in an area long seen as under-supplied.

What did not change much was the basic shape of provision. Average opening times for kindergartens edged up from 8.8 to 9 hours a day, and for crèches from 9.2 to 9.5 hours. Group sizes barely moved: in crèches they slipped from 12 children to 11.9, and in kindergartens from 19.4 to 19.1. At the same time, care by childminders has moved in the opposite direction. Regional reporting on the study said the number of children looked after in that setting fell by more than a third between 2018 and 2024, an indication that formal institutional care has been growing while more flexible forms have been losing ground.

The bill for that expansion has risen quickly. Public spending on the day-to-day running of public childcare reached about €2.6bn in 2023, around €1bn more than in 2017, or a rise of 60%. Once investment spending and transfers to private providers are added, the total reaches €3.9bn. About half of that went on staff, with 15% spent on materials and other running costs, 8% on investment and repayments, and roughly a quarter on transfers. Vorarlberg saw the sharpest increase in operating expenditure, more than doubling over the period. Vienna remained the most expensive place to run public provision, which Markus Kaindl, one of the study’s authors, linked to markedly longer opening hours: public crèches and kindergartens there are open for 12.4 hours a day on average, compared with 7.9 hours for crèches in Tirol and Styria and 8.1 hours for kindergartens in those two provinces.

Claudia Bauer, the family minister, used the presentation to argue that the growth in places has not yet delivered genuine freedom of choice for parents. “Das zeigt, dass uns vieles gelungen ist in den letzten Jahren, aber wir sind noch nicht bei der Wahlfreiheit angekommen, die wir uns wünschen”, she said. Bauer said childcare decisions should be settled within families rather than dictated by outside constraints, and urged the federal states to draw down the money the federal government has made available through fiscal equalisation. The figures were presented at a 10am press conference at the KIWI kindergarten on Wagramer Strasse in Vienna’s 22nd district, where Bauer appeared alongside Johannes Pressl, president of the Austrian Association of Municipalities, and Kaindl.

The numbers also land in the middle of a wider financing argument that goes beyond simple growth in places. In July, Die Presse reported on a separate study by the KDZ public administration research centre which said Austria relies on a “Vielzahl von Finanzierungsinstrumenten, die oftmals nebeneinander bestehen” in early-years education. That study said money flows through fiscal equalisation, the Article 15a agreement between the federal government and the states, the Zukunftsfonds, state subsidies and municipal investment programmes. Its conclusion was that federal top-ups can trigger targeted expansion, but they do not close the structural funding gap, and poor coordination often leaves municipalities carrying the practical burden of planning demand-led childcare on their own. In rural areas, it argued, planning across municipal boundaries could both reduce costs and improve coverage.

That concern is not new. An earlier ÖIF working paper from 2021 showed that public spending on crèches, kindergartens, after-school care and mixed-age groups had already risen from €1.46bn in 2008 to €2.61bn in 2017, an increase of 79.4%; even after adjusting for inflation and population growth in the relevant age group, the rise was still just under 60%. The same paper found that transfers to private providers and households had jumped by 157.1% over that period. It also highlighted a persistent regional imbalance: Vienna accounted for a disproportionately large share of spending relative to its population of under-10s, while Tirol’s share was comparatively low. Public-sector hourly labour costs averaged €22.1 nationally in 2017, but reached €28.1 in Vienna. On quality, the historical picture was mixed even then: public kindergartens improved their child-to-carer ratio from 7.5 children per worker in 2007/08 to 6.4 in 2016/17, while crèches and after-school care saw little improvement or a deterioration.

The official statistical backdrop is also becoming broader. Statistics Austria’s latest annual publication on elementary education and after-school care, covering 2023/24, says the series has been running since 1972 and is intended as a decision aid for family policy. For the first time, it includes children cared for by childminders in what it calls an extended attendance rate, alongside data on opening hours, closing days and staff structure. Pressl said that, since the 2023 year used in the expenditure study, both services and costs had moved on further. He pointed to examples of co-operation between municipalities and said the latest reform-partnership talks had produced an agreed definition of quality criteria, while insisting that local flexibility should not be lost.