At Prenatal to Five Fiscal Strategies, we have worked with states and communities across the country to help them understand the true cost of child care – what it actually takes for child care programs to meet state licensing requirements, provide safe and quality care, and to pay educators at a level that both acknowledges the critical role they play in child development and compensates them as professionals. Several states have made great strides in recent years, doing the work to develop a deeper understanding of the cost of care and the broken market, increasing public funding so that subsidy reimbursement rates cover the cost of care, and changing eligibility requirements so more working families can receive assistance in paying for child care. However, across the country there remains a lack of understanding at most levels of decision making about why child care costs what it costs, why it should cost more, and why the true cost is beyond the means of most working families. Prenatal to Five Fiscal Strategies (P5FS) has developed a 50-state child care cost model to improve understanding of this critical issue. This interactive web-based tool allows users to estimate the true cost of child care in each state and to see how that cost is impacted by various program characteristics, including program size, ages of children served, and workforce compensation levels. (author abstract)