Glaiza Giron has offered round-the-clock childcare in her Northern Nevada home for more than two decades.
A few months ago, a mother who worked nights at a warehouse near USA Parkway turned to Giron for overnight care. Giron took her on, though she said the long commute between the warehouse and her house in Golden Valley made the timing difficult. Other warehouse workers who have called her haven't been as lucky. Due to state capacity rules, she can't always take them.
Giron said childcare that fits nontraditional shifts is "really hard for parents to find" from licensed providers.
"We're capped for overnight care," she said. "I wish we could have more kids overnight."
She is one of the only providers in her area still licensed for overnight hours, and one of just 35 facilities statewide that offer round-the-clock care. For those warehouse workers, the search probably won't go any better elsewhere. Nevada has one of the highest shares of any state of parents working nights, early mornings and weekends — and the number of childcare providers licensed and willing to cover those hours keeps shrinking.
That leaves parents who work odd hours with few formal childcare options. They fall back on family, friends or informal arrangements that researchers have linked to strains on children, marriages and parents' jobs.
The number of Nevada facilities offering 24-hour care has fallen by about half since 2018, from 71 to 35, according to state licensing reports and current figures from Molly Moser, public information officer for Nevada's Child Care & Development Program and Child Care Licensing.
Of the 35 facilities still offering for round-the-clock care, 26 are in Southern Nevada and nine are in the north. That leaves rural areas, including mining communities such as Elko, with few or no formal overnight options.
Meanwhile, the need for childcare outside regular hours runs high. About 44 percent of Nevada children younger than 6 in working families have parents who work nontraditional hours, meaning before 7 a.m. or after 6 p.m. on weekdays or any time on weekends, according to a 2021 Urban Institute analysis. That is the second-highest share of any state, behind Mississippi, and well above the national average of 36 percent.
The share is even higher for families with fewer resources. Half of low-income children and 70 percent of children of working single parents have parents who work those hours.
Night shifts are common in the state. Among the country's 100 largest metro areas, the Las Vegas metro had the highest share of night-shift workers, about 10.3 percent, or roughly 112,000 people, according to a 2022 analysis of census data by the home services company Porch. Statewide the share was 9.5 percent, compared with about 6 percent nationally.
Chelsea Sliter, family resource director at the Children's Cabinet, a Reno-based nonprofit that helps families find childcare, said parents have struggled with that mismatch for a long time.
"It's something that's really always been a challenge for parents, especially living in a state that's 24 hours," she said. "A lot of parents kind of express frustration with that."
She said requests for overnight care have ticked up over the last two or three years, as more people move to the area and many take on more than one job.
And Nevada's 24-hour economy shows no signs of slowing down — in fact, it's growing.
Some of the industries driving Nevada's job growth are among the most likely to run through the night. Warehousing and storage employment in Nevada more than doubled between 2017 and 2025, from about 18,400 jobs to 42,100, and transportation and warehousing as a whole grew 45 percent. Nationally, more than 30 percent of transportation and warehousing workers reported working between 1-5 a.m. in the past month, more than double the rate for all workers, according to a 2025 federal study.
Leisure and hospitality, the sector that includes casinos, accounted for about 360,700 jobs in 2025, or nearly 23 percent of all jobs in the state, roughly double its share nationally, according to federal labor data. About 18.2 percent of accommodation and food service workers, a key part of Nevada's tourism sector, reported working between 1-5 a.m.
Newer industries are adding jobs in Nevada, too. Battery manufacturing grew more than fourfold over the same period, from about 3,100 jobs to 14,200. Employment in data processing and hosting, the category that includes data centers, grew from about 1,900 jobs to 3,200, up 65 percent, as new projects keep arriving in the state. Data centers run around the clock, though typically with small overnight crews.
What happens to the families who can't find overnight childcare? They make do, mostly turning to relatives, friends or neighbors, or arranging alternating shifts between two working parents.
But those informal arrangements carry their own costs. Sliter said families who rely on a rotating cast of relatives, friends or unlicensed sitters can end up with care that's inconsistent and stressful.
"There could be transportation challenges, sleep disruptions for children, employment instability if you can't rely on somebody or you don't know who you're using from day to day," she said.
Research backs that up. A 2023 study that followed nearly 5,000 children in 20 U.S. cities found that mothers' nonstandard work schedules were linked to more behavior problems in their kids, with night shifts showing the strongest effects among mothers without a high school diploma. That echoes a 2014 review that found 21 of 23 earlier studies linked parents' nonstandard schedules to at least one negative outcome for children.
How childcare is patched together matters, too. A 2024 research review from the University of Chicago and the Erikson Institute pointed to research showing that children in nonstandard-hour care tend to fare worse, especially in informal arrangements, and that steadier care may help. A 2014 study found that young children who bounced between caregivers, or juggled several at once, showed more emotional and behavioral struggles.
Night shifts can strain parents' relationships as well. Sociologist Harriet Presser found that fathers with young children who worked fixed night shifts in the first five years of marriage were about six times as likely to separate or divorce as those who worked days. For mothers married more than five years, night shifts roughly tripled the odds. More recent research on unpredictable schedules points the same way: A Harvard Shift Project study of nearly 7,000 hourly retail and food service workers found that 94 percent of married workers with stable schedules were still married nine months later, compared with 82 percent of those with the most unpredictable ones.
Employers also feel the effects. Forty-seven percent of 433 Nevada businesses surveyed by the state in 2023 said childcare access was an impediment, and the state's Office of Workforce Innovation, citing a 2025 CNBC analysis, puts the resulting productivity losses at about $1 billion a year.
Sliter said closing the gap would take more funding, possibly including higher subsidy reimbursement rates for providers, along with workforce development support and technical assistance to help providers navigate licensing. Any of those changes, she said, would likely have to come through the Legislature.
Few of the employers who employ off-shift workers offer concrete help with childcare. Only 5.5 percent of Nevada businesses surveyed by the state in 2023 offered on-site childcare, with most citing cost and liability as barriers, according to a report from the Governor's Office of Workforce Innovation.
That includes Amazon, which runs day, night and early-morning warehouse shifts in Nevada but offers no childcare subsidy, on-site care or referral service of its own. Spokesperson Matthew Gardea instead pointed to the company's healthcare, paid leave and flexible scheduling options.
Casino resorts, which have run around the clock for decades, vary in what they offer. Bally's Corp. said it gives employees discounts through Upwards, a childcare referral service, but no direct subsidy.
The Nevada Resort Association said those decisions are left to individual companies. "Nevada's resort industry recognizes the importance of reliable child care for employees and their families," said Virginia Valentine, the association's president and CEO said in an emailed statement.
A few resorts have run on-site centers, though rarely through the night. The MGM Grand operated a 24-hour childcare center until 2017, when it cut the overnight hours, citing low demand. The Venetian appears to still run an on-site center, which was operating as of a 2024 news story. A 2000 Las Vegas Sun article reported it was open from 6 a.m. to midnight.
In Northern Nevada, Patagonia has expanded on-site care at its Reno distribution center, though only during the day. The program, which started with one infant classroom in 2016, now serves about 85 children from infancy until they're old enough for kindergarten from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. The company covers the share of the cost that tuition doesn't, said Sheryl Shushan, Patagonia's senior director of family services.
"We've long viewed on-site childcare as both a family benefit and a business investment," Shushan said.
Other large round-the-clock employers said little. The Nevada Independent contacted Tesla, Panasonic, Switch, Google, Station Casinos, MGM Grand, The Venetian, Grand Sierra Resort, Atlantis and Peppermill about childcare benefits for overnight workers. Station Casinos declined to comment, and the others did not respond.
Nevada's childcare shortage starts long before the sun goes down. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that 66.1 percent of Nevada children live in a childcare desert. Nevada families who pay for childcare spend more than 32 percent of their income on it, the most of any state, according to a LendingTree analysis.
Overnight care is harder still to find, even though providers say parents are looking for it.
"You'll see them a lot on social media. Parents are asking for overnight care," Giron said.
But those requests don't always turn into steady enrollment at licensed providers. Sliter said many providers are licensed for 24-hour care but don't actually offer those hours, citing cost, staffing and demand that is too inconsistent to make staying open worth it. Moser said low enrollment is the top reason facilities cut back their hours.
The fact that overnight childcare facilities are cutting hours despite apparent demand seems paradoxical, but one explanation comes from what families want. Sliter said parents prefer a home setting over a center when their children need overnight care, and those home-based options are disappearing.
Nevada had 471 licensed family childcare homes in 2009, according to the Children's Cabinet. By the end of 2024, it had 101, according to state licensing data. The state is now down to 76, according to Sliter. "That's concerning," she said.
Giron points to licensing as one reason other providers have dropped overnight care. When Washoe County's childcare licensing program folded into the state's in 2024, she said, providers who offered 24-hour care had to rewrite their policies, extra work she believes pushed some of them to stop.
"Our job is very demanding," she said. "I think it's the licensing, in all honesty."
In rural areas, that hurdle can keep caregivers from getting licensed at all. Lacey Osterberg, who runs a home childcare program in Spring Creek near Elko, said she isn't aware of any overnight providers in her area, and that many caregivers there skip the licensing process entirely.
"There's a lot of people around here that don't get licensed and that just do it as babysitting," she said, adding that the licensing process took her more than a year of paperwork. "It's a lot of money. It's not a cheap process at all."
State rules also cap how many overnight slots a provider can have. Under Nevada's regulations, a licensed family home can care for no more than six children and a group home no more than 12. Centers that stay open between 9 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. must keep one caregiver for every six children younger than 3 and one for every 10 children older than 3, and any staff member on duty at night has to stay awake for the whole shift.
Providers who want to offer overnight care say the work wears them down. Giron said she can stay awake with children only two nights in a row before her husband, who is also licensed, takes over. If a family needs five straight nights, she tells them to find someone else to fill the gap.
"I can stay up for two days. That's the maximum," she said. "I can't exhaust myself."
Nancy Konopacki, a Reno-area provider, stopped offering overnight and evening care about a year ago after bounced checks and chronically late pickups and drop-offs, including one at 4 a.m. that left her unable to get back to sleep before her day began. She now runs a 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. schedule.
Low pay compounds the problem. Nevada childcare workers earned a median wage of $11.92 an hour in 2022, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Providers say they try to keep their rates down so care stays within reach for families.
Giron charges $65 a day. For families on subsidies, the Children's Cabinet covers $40 of that, and parents pay the rest. "As much as I want to make so much money, I just can't do that just because it's not fair," she said.
Osterberg charges $5 to $7 an hour per child, depending on whether she provides meals and snacks, and plans to raise those rates by $1 in January. She said she tries to stay "on the lower end, but still have to be able to pay our employees and ourselves."
That balance is also holding back her overnight plans. Osterberg got licensed for 24-hour care this June, but so far operates only from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. because of staffing.
"Right now we're just trying to … do the 6:30 to 6:30 until we make enough money to be able to hire more staff to do night shifts," she said. She expects night staff to be hard to find, though she's willing to work nights herself. She plans to start offering overnight care in about a year.
"I just see a huge need for [overnight care] in the community," she said, "and that's why I chose to do what I did."
