Working parents would trade a 20% pay rise for childcare at work
Finding the right talent remains very difficult in many sectors. That is why employers try to stand out by offering extra benefits: additional days of leave, a lottery giving trips to new recruits, sport at the workplace, working four days but being paid for five… Organisations try to make a difference in the most original ways. In our new study, we examine how offering childcare can increase a job’s attractiveness and what young parents are willing to trade for it.
For many (young) parents, combining work and family remains a difficult exercise. Childcare is a crucial link that helps make this combination possible. In Flanders, however, the supply remains scarce, expensive, and often hard to reconcile with full-time or atypical working hours. Working parents might therefore find it appealing if their employer organised childcare themselves. But can such a benefit also make a job more attractive?
About the study
We investigated this using a scenario experiment: we asked working parents of young children to evaluate various fictitious job offers. When recruiting participants, we made sure our sample was representative of the broader population. In total, 720 job offers were evaluated.
The job offers varied randomly on a number of characteristics, including whether or not childcare organised by the employer was offered. Both the location of that childcare (close to home or close to work) and the opening hours (standard or aligned with working hours) varied. We also varied a possible financial contribution to the childcare costs (here, the employer would cover 25% of the costs), the extent to which teleworking was possible, and the wage. This allowed us to pinpoint exactly which forms of childcare make jobs more attractive and how much wage parents are willing to give up for them.
The key findings
What do we find? All forms of employer-provided childcare clearly increase a job’s attractiveness. But not all childcare is valued equally. Childcare whose opening hours are aligned with employees’ working hours stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Concretely, our research shows that a job becomes on average 14.6 percentage points more attractive — compared with a job without employer-organised childcare — when the employer provides childcare with aligned opening hours and close to home. If that same childcare is provided near the workplace, attractiveness rises to as much as 16.1 percentage points. When the childcare only has standard opening hours, these effects are significantly smaller. A financial contribution to childcare costs is also appreciated, though less strongly than organising it: a job then becomes on average 6.2 percentage points more attractive.
These are genuinely large effects. When a new job would typically offer a 20% higher salary than one’s current job, people find it equally worthwhile to forgo that entire pay rise if the employer organises childcare (near the workplace, with opening hours aligned to working hours) in return.”
Why is that?
Our experiment also reveals why offering childcare has such a large effect on a job’s attractiveness. Employees immediately link such a job to (i) a better work–life balance, (ii) less stress, (iii) higher productivity, and (iv) higher job satisfaction.
Notably, we found no difference depending on how much employees could telework. One might expect tailored childcare to matter less when people can work from home a lot. Our experiment shows otherwise. Regardless of how much they can telework, every form of employer-organised childcare remains highly valued.
Also striking: mothers and fathers respond equally strongly to childcare measures. Everything related to caring for children (including childcare) is often seen as something for mothers. But our results show that fathers attach just as much importance to it. Both groups clearly find jobs with childcare more attractive and are willing to give up wage for such benefits. This underlines that childcare is truly a structural labour market issue.
Lessons for employers and policymakers
For employers, the research shows that childcare can be a powerful alternative or complement to wages in the battle for talent, certainly in a tight labour market. This can be done by (i) organising childcare themselves, (ii) partnering with existing crèches and reserving places, or (iii) providing a financial contribution to childcare costs. This makes childcare not only an option for large organisations. Smaller organisations, too, can make a difference for employees with young children through relatively limited and feasible measures — such as a financial contribution or a partnership with local childcare — and still send a strong signal to their employees.
For policymakers, this study confirms how large the impact of accessible, flexible, and affordable childcare is for raising the employment rate in our country. To encourage employers to invest in this, policymakers could provide tax incentives — for example, a scheme giving employers who contribute to childcare a clear tax benefit, so that it becomes financially attractive for them to invest in childcare for their employees.
If we want parents to stay in work full-time and sustainably, childcare and work must be better aligned. Employers and policy together have a key role to play in this.
This post also appeared in Dutch via UGent@Work. It is based on joint work with Eline Moens, Elsy Verhofstadt, Luc Van Ootegem, and Stijn Baert. The full paper is available here. This page was last updated on 15 June 2026.