Having a baby in New Jersey? Best and worst states

👶 It's expensive to have a baby in New Jersey, according to one study

👶 But New Jersey is a baby-friendly and family-friendly state

👶 It has the 3rd lowest infant mortality rate in the country

With the average conventional birth costing over $2,600 for mothers with insurance and nearly $15,000 for mothers without insurance in the U.S., personal finance website, WalletHub released a report on 2024’s Best and Worst States to Have a Baby.

WalletHub compared all 50 states and Washington D.C. across 31 key measures of cost, healthcare accessibility, and baby-friendliness.

The data set ranges from conventional delivery charges at hospitals to average annual infant-care costs to the number of pediatricians per capita.

The states were also compared across four key dimensions: cost, healthcare, baby friendliness, and family friendliness, said WalletHub analyst, Chip Lupo.

Based on the data, where does New Jersey rank?

New Jersey ranked midpoint in the study, as the 27th best state overall to have a baby.
Lupo said New Jersey had the strongest showing in the family-friendliness and baby-friendliness metrics, ranking 17th best in both.

The baby-friendliness metric includes categories such as parental leave policies and child care centers per capita, Lupo said.

New Jersey ranked 28th in the health care metric. That covers areas like the infant mortality rate, prenatal care access, the rate of post-partum depression, and fertility clinics per capita.

New Jersey has the third lowest infant mortality rate in the nation, according to the study.

Where does New Jersey fall short?

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

“That’s a big one because that’s the one that covers things such as health insurance premiums, the average annual cost of early childcare, the cost of newborn screening, and even the cost of babysitters and nannies. So, that’s 48th, and that’s what dragged New Jersey down for the most part in this study,” Lupo said.

However, there was one area in the cost metric where New Jersey actually did well. That would be the current status of Medicaid expansion decisions. It ranked number one, Lupo said.

New Jersey finished 36th in the hospital cesarean delivery charges and 38th in the conventional delivery charges.

“This is interesting because nationwide the average conventional delivery cost is more than $2,600 with insurance and $15,000 without, and New Jersey finishing 38th in the conventional delivery charge dimension means there is work that needs to be done,” Lupo said.

While New Jersey ranked 27th overall as the best state to have a baby in the nation, its neighbors New York ranked 12th, Connecticut 15th, and Pennsylvania 24th, all of them faring better than The Garden State.

Lupo reiterated that it’s very expensive to have a baby in New Jersey, and that was the main reason why it did not score as high as its neighboring states in the study.

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

Massachusetts also has the sixth lowest food insecurity rate for children and the seventh highest share of children under three years old with all seven recommended vaccines.

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 baby is Mississippi, followed by Alabama, South Carolina, New Mexico, and Georgia.

To view the full report and your state’s rank, please visit here.

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