When “Just Don’t Come In Sick” Isn’t an Option: What SHB 2689 Means for Washington Families

Picture a mom in Spokane. She works retail, her hours change week to week, and her son has asthma that flares when the smoke rolls in or when he catches whatever’s going around his classroom. Some months he’s at child care every day. Other months, he’s home for a week at a time, and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Until this year, that unpredictability was absorbed by the system. Her provider got paid for the month as long as her son showed up at least once. Now, under SHB 2689, that’s no longer true.

What actually changed

SHB 2689 rewrites how the state pays for subsidized child care through Working Connections Child Care (WCCC). Instead of paying providers for the full month when a child attends even one day, payment now follows attendance directly:

• A child who attends 1–8 days in a month gets the provider paid for at most 11 days.
• 9–15 days attended caps payment at 15 days.
• Only at 16 or more days attended does a provider get paid for the full month.

Child care centers move to this system for the October 2026 month of service. Licensed family child care homes follow in July 2027.

There’s real money behind this shift. The state expects to save around $91 million in 2027, and about $253 million a year after that. Payment rates did rise this July, to the 85th percentile of the market, but that bump is temporary: it drops back down to the 75th percentile in July 2027. Meanwhile, a planned expansion of who qualifies for subsidy was cancelled, so eligibility stays capped at 60% of state median income.

Why this isn’t just a budget line

Here’s the problem: staff paychecks, rent, insurance, and program supply costs (food, materials, etc.) don’t fluctuate with attendance. A child care program’s biggest costs are fixed, but under this law, its revenue isn’t. That mismatch falls hardest on exactly the families and programs least able to absorb it.

Programs serving families with unpredictable schedules – shift workers, parents managing a health crisis, families in unstable housing – are the ones most exposed to revenue swings they can’t control. Some providers, understandably trying to stay solvent, may tighten attendance policies or hesitate to enroll families whose schedules they can’t count on. Two programs have already announced they’ll close, effective September 30th, just ahead of the October deadline. When a program closes, it’s not just a business decision. Teachers lose jobs. Providers who’ve built their careers around caring for children are left to find a new one. Children lose the people and routines they trust. Parents scramble to find a new care provider so they can continue working.

Kids with IEPs or higher support needs are especially vulnerable, since they often require staffing ratios that are hard to justify on inconsistent revenue. And the law only allows five paid professional development days. That might sound like a technicality, but ask any early childhood educator what those days are for: time as a team, away from the floor, to breathe. It’s real relief from the physical and emotional demands of caring for groups of young children all day, every day. Cutting that down doesn’t just affect morale. Over time, it affects the quality of care every child receives.

And this burden isn’t distributed evenly. It falls hardest on Black women and other women of color, who make up much of this workforce and head many of the families with the least predictable schedules. It falls on the neighborhood programs that anchor communities already under pressure to hold on to what they have.

Families paying privately aren’t insulated either. When subsidy revenue gets less reliable, providers often have little choice but to raise private tuition to cover the gap or limit the number of subsidized slots they can afford to offer. Either way, the ripple reaches everyone.

Advocates and providers raised these concerns throughout the 2026 legislative session, yet lawmakers moved forward and voted this into law.

Attendance isn’t always a choice

Maybe the hardest part of this law is what it assumes: that attendance is something families control. It often isn’t. A parent managing trauma, a transportation breakdown, a family member’s chronic illness – these don’t show up as line items in a funding formula, but they show up in a family’s ability to get a child to care every single day.

That mom in Spokane isn’t choosing to keep her son home. Neither are the programs choosing to close. They’re responding to a system that now asks them to absorb risk they didn’t create.

What comes next

If you’re a provider, a parent, or a concerned citizen and you’re already seeing this play out – a schedule change, a hard conversation with a family, a program you know that’s struggling – contact the governor’s office and your legislators. The people living this are the ones who can make it real to the people writing the next budget.