The awkward arithmetic of a childcare centre

A childcare centre's sums are awkward because the law fixes how many children one carer may mind, while the fee can only climb until parents give up. So the fee feels too high at home and too low on the centre's own books, and my guess is that both of those are true.

One carer, three fees

The ministry's own standards for running a taska set it out plainly: one carer to three babies, one to five children aged one to three, and one to ten after that. The same document says a carer must get at least the minimum wage, RM1,700 a month.¹

Prices are looser. An association president told The Star that mid-level centres charge around RM600 a child.³ Another report has a parent quoting RM800 to RM1,000 for a full package at a kindergarten.⁴

I couldn't find a proper survey, so I'll use RM800 as a round number of my own.⁴

What one carer's children bring in each month, in ringgit

Now hold that against her RM1,700.¹ The older room looks almost comfortable. The baby room leaves RM700, before EPF, rent, food, or anyone covering her lunch.¹

To bring in what the older room does, a baby's fee would have to be about RM2,667.¹ I don't think many parents would stay for that, so the baby room is mostly carried by the others.

In 2025 the minister said nurseries sometimes refuse babies, and the reason she gave was safety.⁵ I've no reason to doubt that. I'd only add that the sum points the same way.

The same report has a Selangor state official worried that refusals could push parents towards unregistered home-based care. That's the awkward arithmetic leaving the building, because a place nobody has registered isn't counting carers for anyone.⁵

And the older room empties

Here's the part I enjoyed. A taska is for children under four, so the one room that pays well is also the room children age out of soonest.²

A three-year-old gets about a year in it. Then the family goes off to a tadika, and you're back to filling the expensive rooms and waiting for them to grow.

A whole room, roughly

Say a small centre with 23 children: three babies, ten toddlers and ten older ones. The ratios ask for four carers, and JKM's 3.5 square metres a child means about 80 square metres of floor.² Call it a modest shoplot.

A home-based taska gets a smaller floor rule, 2.5 square metres a child, and no shoplot to rent.² I'd guess that's the appeal of starting in a living room, though I couldn't find anyone's numbers on it.

The ratio doesn't pause for leave, lunch or a long day, so I'd add a relief carer and a cook. At that fee the room bills eighteen thousand four hundred ringgit a month. Everything else in the sketch is my guess, and rent is the softest part of it, because I couldn't find a rent figure to borrow.

Where that RM18,400 goes, my rough guess

That 5% is about RM900, which is less than one carer earns.¹ It's meant to pay the owner, who in a place this size is probably also the person doing the paperwork and the fire drill.

The ranking at least matches what the trade says. The president of a providers' association told the NST that wages and contributions are operators' highest costs.⁴

I could be wrong about the size of the gap. What would change my mind is one small taska's real accounts, and I couldn't find any.

Run the same room at the two ends of those prices and the mood changes completely. At RM600 a child it loses about RM3,500 a month.³ At RM1,000 it clears about RM5,750, so a couple of hundred ringgit on the fee is the whole business.⁴

Why it still feels like too much

From the other side of the gate, RM800 is nearly half of what that carer earns in a month.¹ That's one child, out of one household's income, every month until the child leaves.

Fees were set to rise with the minimum wage too, by 20% to 25% according to the associations in late 2024.⁴ There's tax relief of up to RM3,000 a year, which helps less than it sounds, because relief isn't cash back.³

So the parent is right that it's a lot, and the operator is right that it isn't enough. Each child is paying for a fifth of a person, and a person is expensive even at the legal minimum.

If I owned one, I'd look at the age mix before I looked at the fee. Whether the place works seems to be decided less by what it charges than by who's in which room.