Best and worst states for babies: where does NJ stand?

👶 Study finds it’s expensive to have a baby in New Jersey

👶 But New Jersey is a baby and family friendly state

👶 It has the third lowest infant mortality rate in the country

With a conventional birth in the U.S. costing an average of over $2,600 for mothers with insurance and nearly $15,000 for mothers without insurance, private finance website WalletHub has released a report on the best and worst states to have a baby in 2024.

WalletHub compared all 50 states and Washington DC based on 31 key criteria such as cost, accessibility to healthcare and baby friendliness.

Data range from traditional hospital delivery fees to average annual infant care costs to the number of pediatricians per capita.

The states were also compared on four key dimensions: cost, health care, baby-friendliness and family-friendliness, said WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo.

Where does New Jersey rank based on this data?

New Jersey ranked in the middle of the pack in the study and is the 27th best state overall for having a child.
Lupo said New Jersey performs best in the family-friendliness and baby-friendliness categories, ranking 17th in both.

The baby-friendliness benchmark includes categories such as parental leave policies and daycare centers per capita, Lupo said.

New Jersey ranked 28th in the healthcare sector, which includes areas such as infant mortality rate, access to prenatal care, postnatal depression rate, and fertility clinics per capita.

According to the study, New Jersey has the third lowest infant mortality rate in the country.

Where is New Jersey weak?

When it comes to the cost of having a baby, New Jersey needs a lot of help, Lupo says.

“That’s a big one because it covers things like health insurance premiums, the average annual cost of early child care, the cost of newborn screenings, even the cost of babysitters and nannies. So that’s 48th, and that’s why New Jersey came in the most down in this study,” Lupo said.

There was one area of ​​the cost metric, however, where New Jersey actually did well. That would be the current state of Medicaid expansion decisions. It ranked first, Lupo said.

New Jersey ranked 36th in hospital costs for cesarean sections and 38th in hospital costs for conventional deliveries.

“This is interesting because nationally, the average cost of a conventional delivery is more than $2,600 with insurance and $15,000 without insurance. And with New Jersey ranking 38th in the cost of conventional delivery, there is still work to be done,” Lupo said.

While New Jersey ranked 27th overall as the best state in the US to have children, its neighbors New York at 12th, Connecticut at 15th, and Pennsylvania at 24th performed better than the Garden State.

Lupo reiterated that having a child in New Jersey is very expensive and that this is the main reason why the state did not perform as well in the study as neighboring states.

The best state to have a child is Massachusetts, primarily because it has the lowest infant mortality rate in the country and the fourth lowest maternal mortality rate.

Massachusetts also has the sixth lowest rate of childhood food insecurity and the seventh highest percentage of children under three who have all seven recommended vaccinations.

The second best state to have a baby is North Dakota, followed by Minnesota, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.

The worst state to have a child is Mississippi, followed by Alabama, South Carolina, New Mexico and Georgia.

You can find the full report and your state’s ranking here.

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