This directory lists the child care programs that the NYS Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) regulates. Namely, those are day care centers, small day care centers, group family and family day care homes, and school age child care programs. New York City's day care centers and school-based programs fall under the NYC Health Department instead, so they come from that agency's own list. While the Health Department lists each permit on its own line, a center whose preschool permit and infant and toddler permit give one name and one address appears here only once, with the two capacities added together.
When the page runs on its own website, it reads both lists live from data.ny.gov and NYC Open Data. If it cannot reach them, it falls back on saved copies and says as much under “Program types”. Each county's Child Care Resource and Referral agency comes from the contact list behind the earlier “Find Nearest Child Care” map, which was last edited on 2 December 2024. As of that date, 15 of the 62 counties were missing a contact person, an email address, or a phone number. For Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the directory fills those gaps with the details listed for the same agency office under the Bronx and Queens.
Beyond filling those gaps, the directory corrects the entries for five counties where the agencies' own websites say otherwise. According to those sites, the list (1) swaps the contacts for Ulster and Greene counties; (2) still gives a Kingston street address that Family of Woodstock has since left, even for its Hudson office, which serves Columbia and Greene counties; and (3) misspells the email address for Cortland and Tompkins counties.
Capacity refers to licensed capacity – the most children a program is allowed to care for at one time – rather than to the number of openings. As such, questions about openings are best put to the program itself or to the county's resource and referral agency. What is more, the state withholds the street addresses of some programs, nearly all of them group family and family day care homes. While those programs still appear in the directory with their city and ZIP code, it is not possible to show them on the map or to measure their distance from a search point. The distances on the page are straight-line miles rather than driving distances.
Addresses are located with the Census Bureau's geocoder, whereas ZIP codes, towns, and counties come from the 2020 Census TIGER/Line boundaries. School districts come from the state's list, except that New York City programs without one (including every Health Department program) take the community school district on the city's map in which they sit. The major roads on the map come from NYSDOT, just as they do on the commuter flow map.
Because villages and hamlets are not towns in their own right, a search for one starts from the middle of the programs on the map that give it as their city. Likewise, a search for a town that shares its name with a village or hamlet (e.g., East Hampton or Malone) starts from the middle of the programs in or near the town that give that name as their city, since the point that the Census Bureau uses to label such a town can sit miles away from them.