NYC Public Schools Lost 115,000 Students in a Decade

New York City's public school enrollment has fallen from more than 1 million students a decade ago to 885,000 this year, and City Comptroller Mark Levine expects another 150,000 to disappear over the next decade.

The contraction has left 219 city schools with fewer than 200 students each — some too small to field a sports team, Levine said in a post on X. "This is not sustainable," he wrote. Gothamist reported that the city will have to consolidate schools with sharply declining enrollment.

The driver, according to Levine: families with young children are giving up on the city's price tag.

"Raising a family in New York City is increasingly difficult as the cost of living rises, and declining student enrollment is one troubling sign of that challenge," Levine said in a statement to Fortune. "Affordability is a major factor, but not the only one, and we need to better understand every driver of this trend to respond with viable, data-driven solutions."

Why are families leaving?

Families with young children now leave New York City at more than twice the rate of households without them, and the exodus is reshaping both the school system and the city's fiscal base.

"Families with young kids are twice as likely to move out of the city than the rest of the population," Emily Eisner, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, told Fortune. "That's because it's really expensive to raise kids in the city these days."

Housing compounds the pressure as children grow. "There's basically no options for families to find an affordable housing situation," Eisner said.

A Fiscal Policy Institute report from June 2024 quantified the gap. Key findings:

• Households with a child under 6 were 112% more likely to leave the city than those without.
• Such families made up 30% of out-migrants but only 14% of the population.
• Among New Yorkers who left the state after the pandemic, 36% cited better or more affordable housing, up from 16% before it.

The report calls the outflow a policy failure and warns it raises long-run fiscal and economic concerns.

What does it cost to raise a child?

The national picture is bleak. LendingTree puts the 18-year cost of raising a child at more than $300,000, with childcare the largest expense for families with children under 5.

Nationwide, care for an infant and a 4-year-old averages $28,190 a year. Staying within the federal 7% affordability benchmark for that expense would require a household income of $402,708. The average two-child household actually earns $145,656.

Parents spend about 20% of their income on childcare, according to Care.com, and one in five spend more than $30,000 a year. In a BMO survey, 82% of parents said the cost of raising children has "gotten out of control."

Housing in New York strains budgets further. A buyer needs at least $211,970 in household income to afford a median-priced city home, according to StreetEasy — nearly three times the national figure, though down $10,625 from a year earlier. Only 15% of city households earn $200,000 or more.

Is it only about money?

No. Declining birth rates are shrinking the pipeline of children nationwide. U.S. fertility fell to a record low in 2024, below 1.6 children per woman, and births in 2025 ran about 24,000 below the 2024 total. New York City recorded about 110,000 births in 2019 and fewer than 100,000 every year since 2020.

The leavers are also not who many assume. A new FPI report shows departing New Yorkers are not the wealthiest — in typical years, FPI found, the top 1% of earners leave at one-quarter the rate of everyone else.

"I don't think they migrate because of taxes," Eisner said of middle-income families. "They migrate because of the high cost of living, which really is about childcare costs and housing costs."

A city Education Department survey adds nuance: 40% of families who left the school system moved out of the city, citing a better environment to raise kids, concerns about schools, and more housing space.

What could stop the decline?

Eisner points to universal free childcare and a larger housing supply as the levers that matter. Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on making childcare free for children from 6 weeks to 5 years old. "Those will play a significant role in bringing the cost of living down," she said.

With 219 schools already below 200 students and consolidation on the table, the city's next budget cycle will test whether those policies can arrive fast enough to slow an enrollment slide that Levine projects will erase another 150,000 students.