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A crucial precondition to balance family and career in all of Germany is good and needs-based childcare availability – so in Frankfurt, a family-friendly city, this is also naturally an important issue.

Childcare services

Frankfurt already has a wide range of childcare facilities with more than 1,100 day-care centers and after-school care centers. These are run both by the city and by independent institutions and offer space for over 50,000 children of different ages. The portal www.kindernetfrankfurt.de gives parents an overview. It enables precise searches and online preregistration for all municipal childcare services.

Expansion

Strong population growth is a main reason for the steadily growing demand for childcare places in Frankfurt. Through the continuous expansion of care services in all age groups, around 1,500 new places are being created each year in crèches, kindergartens, after-school care and school-based childcare services. The City School Authority always pays attention to the high quality of the facilities with regard to education, care and equipment.

Costs

Free childcare has been available since August 1, 2018 for children from the age of three until they start school if the child’s main place of residence is Frankfurt. This means that parents only pay for meals, whether the care is half-day, part-time or full-time. The situation is similar in the rest of Hesse, although only up to 6 hours a day are free. In Frankfurt a full-day place (9-10 hours) in a nursery, crèche or mixed-age kindergarten group currently costs parents of children under three 198 euros.

International childcare

Frankfurt and its surrounding area have an especially high number of residents from diverse countries so many international kindergartens focus on multilingual education. Pre-school children, for example, can learn a foreign language at a very young age at the bilingual Phorms kindergarten (German-English), the trilingual Erasmus kindergarten (German, English and Spanish) or the Le Jardin kindergarten, which even offers four different languages (German, English, French and Spanish).

Contact addresses for childcare in Frankfurt and a list of international kindergartens can be found here.