What do I need to use Daycare vs Stay-Home?

The second earner's income; Childcare cost; The marginal tax rate; Career shape.

Is Daycare vs Stay-Home free to use?

Yes — run it free in the browser playground (no API key needed for the sponsored trial, or bring any provider key), or install it into Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT and more via npx pm-claude-skills. MIT-licensed and open source.

Daycare vs Stay-Home

Q: How do I know the Daycare vs Stay-Home output is good?

The skill verifies itself against its own quality checks: The comparison uses marginal tax and net income — never gross vs. daycare; Both timescales appear: the temporary childcare years and the compounding trajectory; The re-entry penalty is labeled a placeholder and treated as a sensitivity, not a fact; Childcare tax credits/subsidies are flagged as jurisdiction-specific and often large.

🔵 Stable🕐 updated 2026-07-18 🔷 SkillSpec L3 ⚙ ships an executable helper pm-calculators

Run the real math on a parent leaving work versus paying for childcare — the second income net of daycare, marginal taxes, and work costs, AND the career-trajectory cost of years out, over horizons instead of one brutal year. Use when asked does it make sense for me to keep working, daycare costs my whole salary, stay-home vs daycare math, or what does leaving work for 5 years really cost. Produces both sides of the ledger from the script, the horizon comparison, and the decision sheet that lets the non-financials vote.

▶ Run it free — no key needed 📝 Grade your existing draft View SKILL.md ↗

What to give it

▸The second earner's income — and which parent's leaving is actually on the table (the framing "second income" is doing work; make it explicit)

▸Childcare cost — per child per month, the real local quote; number of kids and their ages (the cost cliff at school age is the model's built-in expiry date)

▸The marginal tax rate — marginal, not average; flag it as verify-yours, and note childcare tax credits/subsidies are jurisdiction-specific and often large

▸Career shape — expected raises, how re-entry works in their field (the default penalty is a placeholder; fields differ wildly), and the years-out being considered

✅ The bar it holds itself to

Every skill in this library self-verifies — these are this skill's own quality checks, straight from its definition.

✓The comparison uses marginal tax and net income — never gross vs. daycare

✓Both timescales appear: the temporary childcare years and the compounding trajectory

✓The re-entry penalty is labeled a placeholder and treated as a sensitivity, not a fact

✓Childcare tax credits/subsidies are flagged as jurisdiction-specific and often large

✓At least one middle option is sketched

✓The non-financials get explicit permission to decide

⚠️ What it refuses to do

Do not run gross-salary-vs-daycare — it's the error this skill exists to correct

Do not price only year one — the decision's cost curve is a decade long and mostly later

Do not gender the framing — "the second earner" is whoever the household says it is

Do not let the model moralize either choice — working and staying home both survive honest math

Do not present the re-entry penalty as settled science — it's a field-dependent range wearing a default

Install

npx pm-claude-skills add --agent claude   # or codex · cursor · gemini · hermes
# or one-line MCP (every skill, any client):
claude mcp add pm-skills -- npx -y pm-claude-skills-mcp

Related skills

🔌 Embed this skill

Drop this on your blog, docs, or site — it renders a "Run this skill" card:

<div data-pm-skill="daycare-vs-stay-home"></div>
<script src="https://mohitagw15856.github.io/pm-claude-skills/embed.js" async></script>

💬 Discussion

Daycare vs Stay-Home is one of 630 open-source professional AI agent skills — all SkillSpec L3. Try them all in the browser · ⭐ Star on GitHub · Browse the full catalog