Most Danish Children Under Three Are in Full-Time Childcare

The measure that sits under the gender employment gap

Formal childcare means care provided by an organised service — a nursery, a crèche, a registered childminder — rather than by relatives. This study uses full-time attendance, 30 hours a week or more, for children under three.

Across the EU in 2025, 26.1% of under-threes were in full-time formal care.

Where the provision exists

Denmark records 60.1%, Slovenia 55.9%, Portugal 54.5% and Luxembourg 44.9%.

Denmark's position reflects a system in which places are effectively guaranteed and heavily subsidised, and in which returning to full-time work before a child's first birthday is ordinary.

Slovenia in second place is the entry that resists an income explanation. It is not among the Union's wealthiest Member States and it provides full-time care to more than half its under-threes — more than the Netherlands, Germany or Austria, all of which are richer.

Portugal at 54.5% is in the same position.

Where it does not

Slovakia records 1.1%, Czechia 2.1% and Romania 6.7%.

In Slovakia and Czechia, full-time formal care for children under three is close to non-existent. Both countries operate long parental leave systems — up to three years — and provision for under-threes is built on the assumption that a parent will be at home.

That is a coherent policy design rather than an absence of one. It has consequences the design does not remove: the parent at home is overwhelmingly the mother, and a three-year absence from employment at the start of a career has effects that persist afterwards.

The Dutch anomaly

The Netherlands records 10.6%, which is startling for a wealthy Member State where women's employment is among the Union's highest.

The explanation is part-time work. The Netherlands has the highest part-time employment rate in the Union at 38.6%, and a parent working three days a week needs three days of childcare, not five. Dutch children are in formal care in large numbers; comparatively few are in it for 30 hours or more.

This is the clearest demonstration that a full-time childcare measure is not a measure of childcare availability. It measures a particular combination of care and working patterns, and the Netherlands has a different combination rather than less care.

The relationship to employment

Across the Union the two measures line up: the Member States where more under-threes attend full-time care tend to have narrower gender employment gaps. The correspondence is derived here from the two extractions, each a single year, so it says nothing about either measure moving over time. At the bottom of this ranking it is looser. Of the ten Member States with the lowest full-time attendance, four have gaps wider than the EU's 9.6 points — Romania's is 18.7 and Czechia's 10.7 — and six have narrower ones, Slovakia among them at 8.7 despite recording the Union's lowest attendance.

The direction of that relationship is not established by this data, and it plausibly runs both ways: care is not provided because mothers are expected to be at home, and mothers stay at home because care is not provided. What the extraction establishes is that the two tend to occur together, not that either follows from the other.