Overview
- Destatis reports 4.06 million children in care on 1 March 2025, down 33,800 or 0.8% year over year.
- The number of under-threes in formal childcare fell 5.6% to 801,300, while the participation rate edged up to 37.8%.
- The statistics office attributes the drop primarily to declining births over the past three years.
- Provision continued to expand, with roughly 61,000 Kitas up 0.6% and 795,700 staff up 2.2%, as the share of men reached 8.5%.
- Publicly funded childminders decreased for the fifth year to 37,400 down 5.9% and 96.4% of children in care were in Kitas, with limited comparability to earlier years due to a shift to 2022 census-based population data.