This brief describes a strategy for categorizing U.S. states based on their child care subsidy policies. We focus specifically on state policies related to the allocation of funds from the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). In addition, this report describes methodological challenges that we encountered in this process, along with our solutions to these challenges. We hope that sharing our process and lessons learned will benefit others interested in grouping states based on multiple policy features--and ultimately in understanding how these categories or "packages" of policies relate to outcomes of interest. The brief includes the following sections: an overview of CCDBG and its implications for state policies; the rationale for identifying policy packages; and details of the present study, including our research questions, method, results, methodological challenges and limitations, and the implications for future work. (author abstract)