A part-time nursery place for a child under two now costs an average of £188.75 a week in England — if the family does not qualify for funded hours. That is the headline figure from Coram Family and Childcare's Childcare Survey 2026, published on 18 March 2026, and it is up 4.6% on the previous year, the highest it has been in the 25 years the survey has run. A full-time place for the same child, with no funded entitlement at all, costs £372.06 a week. Those two numbers are the reason the headline claim in this article is true, and they are also the reason it needs qualifying: for families who do qualify for the expanded funded hours, the same full-time place now averages £148.82 a week, down 38.9% in a single year. Childcare in 2026 is two different stories, and which one a family lives in depends on which of three separate schemes they can claim.
The fees: what the 2026 survey found
Coram's survey, based on prices reported by local authorities across England, Scotland and Wales, shows the split clearly. In England, the full expansion of funded hours in September 2025 — 30 hours a week during term time for children from nine months old, for eligible working parents — has cut the cost of a part-time place for eligible families to nothing during term time, and the cost of a full-time place by 39% on 2025. But families who are not eligible — because they are not in work, do not earn enough or do not meet the other criteria — pay an average of £189 a week for a part-time place for a child under two. Coram warns that there is a risk disadvantaged children are being priced out of the same early years education as children from working families.
Scotland and Wales have no equivalent entitlement for under-twos, and their prices kept rising. A part-time nursery place for a child under two now costs an average of £133.08 a week in Scotland, an increase of 5% on 2025, and £166.33 a week in Wales, an increase of 8%. A full-time place in Wales costs about £325 a week, up around 11%; in Scotland a full-time place is £259.10 a week, up 5.3%. Costs for three- and four-year-olds rose across Great Britain too — a full-time place for a three- to four-year-old averages £132.72 a week even after the expanded free-hours entitlement, up 5.9% on last year.
The regional gap inside England is just as wide. A part-time under-two place averages £238.01 a week in inner London, against £156.15 a week in Yorkshire and the Humber. And the funded hours only cover 38 weeks of the year, so bills are larger outside term time.
Scheme one: funded hours are not free childcare
All three- and four-year-olds are entitled to 15 hours a week of funded early education. Working parents of three- and four-year-olds can get 30 hours, and since September 2025 the entitlement in England reaches down to children from nine months old: 30 funded hours a week during term time for eligible working parents. The exact ages and hours differ between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so the first thing to check is the rule for your own nation rather than assuming a headline figure applies everywhere.
Even where funded hours apply, they rarely cover the whole of a nursery day. A child in nursery three days a week may have funded hours covering part of those days, with the rest charged at the nursery's full rate. Meals and consumables are often charged on top. So the monthly bill is not the nursery fee minus the funded hours in one neat subtraction: it is the funded portion, plus full-rate hours for the rest, plus extras.
Scheme two: Tax-Free Childcare, the £2-for-£8 top-up
Tax-Free Childcare is a separate scheme for working parents, and it is the one families most often miss altogether, because nobody hands them an account at the nursery gate. Parents open an online childcare account, pay money in, and the government adds £2 for every £8 they pay in — a 20% top-up on the bill. The top-up is capped at £500 every three months per child, or £2,000 a year; for a disabled child it is £1,000 every three months, or £4,000 a year. To get the full £500 in a quarter, a family needs to pay in £2,000, roughly £667 a month. The account is then used to pay a registered provider directly, and it sits alongside funded hours, not instead of them.
The scale of the take-up is large and still growing: HMRC figures published in October 2026 show 601,620 families received a government top-up through Tax-Free Childcare in June 2026. But there are conditions. Every adult in the household generally needs to be working and expecting to earn at least the equivalent of 16 hours a week at the National Living Wage over the next three months, and neither parent can have an adjusted net income over £100,000. Families must sign in every three months and reconfirm their details, or the top-up stops. And Tax-Free Childcare cannot be claimed at the same time as Universal Credit or childcare vouchers.
Scheme three: Universal Credit, and the pay-first gap
Parents on Universal Credit who are working can get help with childcare costs through the childcare element, claimed back after the costs are paid. The key detail is the order: you pay first and claim after, so the monthly cash flow still has to work even when the eventual help is real. A family that can afford the nursery fee in principle can still struggle in the week the fee leaves the account and the claim has not yet come back.
The element covers up to 85% of eligible childcare costs. From 6 April 2026, the maximum amount for each assessment period rose to £1,071.09 for one child and £1,836.16 for two or more children, according to the Department for Work and Pensions. Both parents — or a single parent — must be in paid work, the childcare must be with a registered provider, and claims must be made within three months of paying. Because the element is paid as part of the overall Universal Credit award, it is also subject to the 55% taper as earnings rise.
Start with the government's childcare guidance — the old Childcare Choices site was replaced in September 2025 by the Best Start in Life hub — which walks through the schemes by your circumstances. Then ask your nursery for the written breakdown that separates funded hours, paid hours and extras, and check it line by line against what you were quoted. If you are on Universal Credit, check the childcare element and its pay-first, claim-after timing before the month the bill falls due. And if local options, waiting lists or the rules for your nation are unclear, your council's Family Information Service can talk through them with you directly.