Child Care Marketing Calendar: What to Do Each Month

A child care marketing calendar is the month-by-month plan behind your marketing: which campaign runs, which age group it fills, and the one action that month, from January re-enrollment to the back-to-school rush.

It is the execution layer of our daycare marketing plan: that page sets the enrollment target and the budget, and this one tells you what to do each month to hit them.

Timing carries the weight because empty rooms are expensive: the U.S. Treasury's September 2021 report on child care supply notes many facilities are small enough that "a month or two without full enrollment can erase their margins."

And the year has a shape worth planning around: KinderCare's Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 says enrollment at its centers and school-age sites is generally higher in the spring and in the fall back-to-school period, and lower in summer and over the year-end holidays.

The shape of the child care year

That filing is one large operator's self-reported pattern, it includes school-age sites, and we found no national dataset that tracks child care enrollment by month, so confirm it against your own waitlist history before committing money to it.

Public payroll data land in the same months: unadjusted BLS employment in child day care services peaked in May 2025 at 1,116,600 jobs, fell about 5% to a July low of 1,061,800, then recovered through the fall (BLS Current Employment Statistics, 2025).

The series counts wage and salary jobs, not children, so read it as a proxy for school-year programs winding down and restarting, never as an enrollment count.

Infant and toddler demand is the exception to the calendar: babies are born in every month, so those rooms need a campaign in every month, and the plan below is aimed mostly at preschool, camp and school-age seats.

The marketing year at a glance

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Campaign season: re-enroll, open houses, spring push

Summer: camps, waitlist, fall backfill

Back-to-school fill

Daycare marketing by month

Each month has one primary job, run on top of the always-on basics: same-day inquiry replies, weekly waitlist follow-up, and tour slots a family can book without calling you.

Camp is the first variation on this list: camp weeks sell from January through May for June starts, which is the entire job of our summer camp marketing guide.

School-age is the second: seats sell in spring and summer for the first school bell, the job our before and after school program marketing guide covers.

The preschool marketing calendar

Preschool runs the earliest calendar of any program you operate: re-enrollment opens in winter, the fall class sells between late winter and May, and January transfers surface in the fall.

Public program dates anchor the decisions parents make: since the 2025-26 school year, California school districts must admit every child who turns four by September 1 to transitional kindergarten (California Education Code §48000), and TK is optional for families, so a California preschool is marketing to the households the public option does not fit.

Florida's Voluntary Prekindergarten is a second example: it offers every 4-year-old a 540-hour school-year or 300-hour summer program, NIEER's 2025 Yearbook reports most VPK children attend nonpublic settings, and its enrollment windows become part of a Florida center's year.

Look up your own state's pre-K and kindergarten cutoff dates each winter and put them on the calendar beside your own.

When families actually start looking, and how fast they decide once they do, is the subject of our preschool enrollment season guide.

When to advertise a daycare

Advertise hardest when the two highs arrive, spring and back-to-school, and keep a floor running through the lows so the families who look in summer and over the year-end holidays still find you.

The chains time it deliberately: KinderCare's 10-K says it uses seasonal campaigns to drive inquiries and runs a continuous outreach program to families to increase online reviews, and its digital channels include display ads, paid social and email to prospective, enrolled and lapsed families (Form 10-K, fiscal 2025; tactics it describes, not results it reports).

What those campaigns can target has narrowed: starting January 19, 2022, Meta removed detailed-targeting options tied to topics it treats as sensitive, health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion and sexual orientation, which means a faith-based preschool cannot aim ads at religious-interest audiences.

From June 23, 2025, Meta also began folding interest options into broader groupings, and campaigns still using removed options stopped delivering on January 15, 2026 unless edited.

Meta pointed advertisers toward engagement and website custom audiences, lookalikes, location targeting and uploaded contact lists instead, which in child care terms means your list of past families and your zip radius do more work than interest picks.

Managed Meta ads are the paid channel this consultancy runs for centers, alongside CRO and local SEO; current prices are on the pricing page.

If the center is brand new

A new center cannot wait for a season: Bright Horizons' Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 says a new center typically reaches break-even in 12 to 24 months and steady-state enrollment in about three years, and cautions the timing may be longer or shorter.

The same filing notes new centers enroll younger children first and fill preschool rooms as children age up, so a first-year calendar is really an infant and toddler campaign that runs every month, one operator's experience rather than an industry rule.

Run the month entries above from opening day, and let the seasonal pushes land on top once your rooms have a history.

Frequently asked questions