Child care benefits that work for the business and the families.

The opportunity

Most companies that offer anything around child care offer a Dependent Care FSA and call it a day. The DCFSA caps out at a few thousand dollars a year of pre-tax money, which barely covers a month of care in New York. For employees who spend five or six figures a year on child care, the gap between what their employer offers and what they actually need is enormous.

That gap exists because the rules used to make richer programs hard to justify. They have changed. Recent federal and state developments mean that an employer that contracts with licensed child care providers on its employees' behalf can recover a meaningful share of the spend through tax credits. In the right situations, the math works out closer to a wash than you would expect.

This is not a loophole. The credits are explicitly in the tax code. They are simply underused, because the structuring is genuinely complicated and the interaction across federal and state rules is not widely understood.

Who this fits

The structure works best for employers who:

• Have a workforce that visibly cares about child care, formally or informally.
• Are profitable, or expect to be over the next few years (you need tax liability to use credits against).
• Operate in or have employees in New York. (The math gets stronger here. We can also help employers outside New York, with a more federal-focused structure.)
• Have a real benefits decision-maker. Not necessarily a CHRO. The owner counts.

If you do not fit cleanly, talk to us anyway. The interesting cases are usually the ones nobody recognized as opportunities.

What we do for you

• Opportunity assessment. We look at your headcount, geography, ownership structure, and current benefits to figure out whether this makes sense and what it would look like in practice. If the answer is no, we say so.
• Program design. We design the arrangement around your specific situation. Which providers. What contractual structure. How it interacts with your existing benefits. How to satisfy the legal requirements that govern who can participate and how.
• Documentation and compliance. We prepare the plan documents, structure the contracts with care providers, and build the records that need to exist before any money moves.
• Ongoing support. Regulations change, your workforce changes, your provider mix changes. We stay engaged so the program keeps working year over year.

We coordinate with your existing benefits broker, CPA, and outside counsel. We do not replace them.

What we do not do

We are not a benefits administrator, a TPA, a child care operator, a law firm, or a CPA firm. We are a specialty advisory shop that knows this corner of the benefits world deeply and works alongside the rest of your team. Pricing is a flat setup engagement plus an annual retainer, not a per-employee admin fee.

Important: nothing here is legal, tax, or financial advice. The right answer for any particular employer depends on facts we do not know yet, and on questions only your own qualified advisors can resolve. Loop them in early.