New Mexico doesn’t have enough daycare — and not just that kind of daycare.
The state’s adult daycare centers play a critical role in ensuring aging New Mexicans — particularly people with dementia — can age with dignity and in their own homes, while ensuring their caregivers have time to work or take a break, said Emily Kaltenbach, Cabinet secretary of the state Aging and Long-Term Services Department.
While New Mexico struggles with a shortage of thousands of childcare slots from Albuquerque to Zuni Pueblo, the state’s adult day centers also are wrangling with a similar capacity issue. Data compiled earlier this year by the state aging department shows the state has just 31 adult daycare programs, which are designed to meet the needs of those who can’t be left home alone safely. Nineteen New Mexico counties have no adult daycare programs.
That’s a concerning position for a state with a rapidly growing population of seniors, Kaltenbach said. According to data from the Alzheimer’s Association, some 46,000 seniors in New Mexico have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. That number is expected to grow, even as the state grapples with a shortage of in-home caregiving and residential care options.
Jim Weber/The New Mexican
“In the next five years, one in four New Mexicans will be over the age of 65,” Kaltenbach said. “That’s quite alarming, and we still have a long way to go to build the infrastructure and to support the providers to care for those individuals.”
Adult daycares offer a more affordable — albeit still costly — option than residential assisted living or memory care facilities, which families typically have to pay for out of pocket. Adult daycares typically cost about $95 per day — equivalent to about $25,000 a year for full-time care — according to the 2025 Genworth Cost of Care Survey, compared to an average annual cost of $74,400 for assisted living and nearly $115,000 for nursing home care.
Kaltenbach said she’d like to see at least one adult daycare program in every New Mexico county, but accomplishing that goal will require more state resources, new facilities, workforce development and provider training.
The state has done all of those things in recent years to expand its childcare capacity, but some eldercare advocates worry New Mexico isn’t willing to do the same for seniors.
“We’re at such point where the demand for any caregiving service far exceeds supply,” said David Davis, founder and executive director of the Santa Fe-based Memory Care Alliance. “There’s not enough in-home caregivers. There is not enough beds in memory care facilities; there’s not enough staff in memory care facilities. There’s not enough adult daycare — probably never will be.”
‘Supportive environment’
At Life Circle Adult Day Center, each day follows a regular rhythm.
It starts with coffee and conversation over a copy of The Daily Chronicle, a one-page publication of fun facts and word scrambles intended to jog participants’ memories and invite discussion, said center Director Lea VanMerkestyn.
From there, participants move on to chair exercises, lunch, music and games. During a Wednesday morning arts and crafts session, paper bugs — colored by center participants — littered work tables, waiting to be glued onto metal jars, while bossa nova played from nearby speakers.
“Adult daycare is not dissimilar to child daycare. … Adult daycare is a physical location where adults with higher level of care [needs] can go during the day, in a safe, supportive environment,” Kaltenbach said.
Inside, Life Circle feels more like a classroom than a caregiving setting. Participants congregate around long tables, one in each of the facility’s two large day rooms. The walls and hallways are decorated with artwork. A whiteboard at the front of each room spells out what’s for lunch (on Wednesday, chicken parmesan lasagna) and a weekly theme (last week, it was “celebrating summer fun”).
With a required staff-to-participant ratio of one to five, Life Center staff are available to help participants with anything they may need and keep them company. Staff members often steer conversation around Life Circle’s long tables to participants’ distant memories, since Alzheimer’s disease primarily affects short-term memory.
“Did you ever have a dog like that?” staff member Kevin McDonald asked as one participant colored in a canine.
The program is a “win-win” for the participants and their caregivers, VanMerkestyn said.
“For the family member who is taking care of their loved one, it’s hard. It’s exhausting mentally, physically,” she said. “They just need a break — but they don’t yet want to put their person into long-term care. So they bring them here, and they get a couple hours to themselves. … and their loved one gets a lot of fun and mental stimulation.”
Jim Weber/The New Mexican
Like most adult day centers in the state, Life Circle adheres to what’s called the “social model,” meaning the facility isn’t a medical facility and staff don’t provide medical care like wound dressing or medication management, VanMerkestyn said.
The center’s participants — many of them people with dementia — attend Life Circle from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., though some stick around until 5 p.m. as their primary caregivers work.
Five-hour days at the center cost $101, 8-hour days $144 — prices relatively consistent with national averages, according to the 2025 Genworth Cost of Care Survey. While some families pay for care at Life Center through veterans’ benefits, long-term care insurance or a limited number of sponsorships, VanMerkestyn said most pay for the care privately.
That’s typically how people pay for adult daycare, though Medicaid sometimes covers the service and the state operates caregiver respite programs that can be applied toward the cost of adult daycare, said Angelina Flores-Montoya, deputy Cabinet secretary of the state aging department.
Often, though, the challenge isn’t just paying for adult daycare. It’s finding it in the first place.
‘The only game in town’
Life Circle is the only adult day center in Santa Fe County.
“We’re the only game in town,” said Life Center board Chair Cynthia Rinaldi.
The day center, which will celebrate its fifth year in operation this month, has capacity for 30 participants per day, after accounting for strict standards for staff-to-participant ratios and space limitations, VanMerkestyn said. Some days, the center operates with a waitlist.
Adult day centers are scattered throughout New Mexico, largely in more populated areas, according to data from the state aging department.
There are seven in Bernalillo County, three each in Eddy and Los Alamos counties, and a couple in Rio Arriba, Doña Ana and McKinley counties. Four adult daycares operate in tribal communities across the state.
Adult daycares are one of a handful of care options available for people who need help with activities of daily living like bathing, dressing, eating and using the bathroom. In-home caregiving and residential facilities — particularly for people in need of memory care — often suffer from similar capacity issues, like workforce shortages and prohibitively high costs.
In some New Mexico counties, adult daycares are even more scarce than senior centers, assisted living and skilled nursing facilities.
Catron and Harding counties — New Mexico’s oldest counties, in which more than 40% of residents are over 65 — don’t have senior centers, much less adult daycare programs.
‘Such a valuable resource’
The state’s aging experts are in agreement: New Mexico doesn’t have enough adult daycare capacity.
“We need to put more resources and focus on building the infrastructure that’s needed for that demand of adult daycare,” Kaltenbach said. “And so, I see that as my responsibility as the secretary of the Aging and Long-Term Services Department, to advocate for additional funding to be able to stand-up more adult daycares.”
That feels particularly true as New Mexico invests heavily in childcare infrastructure, said Daniel Osborn, director of the Non-Metro New Mexico Area Agency on Aging, which helps administer senior centers in 32 of the state’s 33 counties. The state will be able to draw up to $700 million over the next five years to implement a free, universal childcare system, which will offer state-subsidized care for all families, regardless of income.
“How on earth can things like that get pushed through when they impact individuals who, in some cases, are making six-figures and don’t really need that assistance, but you neglect those people who are the most vulnerable?” Osborn wondered of universal childcare assistance.
He continued, “People can tell me all day long that the youth of this state are the most vulnerable. … I don’t agree with that for a minute. The most vulnerable community we have in this state are seniors.”
So far, just 10 of New Mexico’s 31 adult daycare facilities receive financial support from the state, though the state aging department has recently been helping Taos Pueblo get such a program off the ground.
Expansion seems like a natural next step for Life Circle — but its Espinacitas Street building wasn’t designed for people with dementia and can’t hold more than 30 participants at a time, VanMerkestyn said.
“We can’t grow beyond 30 per day here, and there’s a much higher need. … There’s probably over 2,000 people that have dementia in this city, and we’re just serving a drop in the bucket,” she said.
She’d love to see more than one adult day center in the city, including multiple locations that would be more convenient for families.
Rinaldi said her “vision” is to one day open up an adult day center at the city’s midtown campus on St. Michael’s, an area undergoing extensive redevelopment.
Jim Weber/The New Mexican
Davis of the Memory Care Alliance said he’d like to see another adult daycare program open up shop in Eldorado, plus a third on the south side of Santa Fe. To do that, he said, lawmakers should consider relaxing some of the strict regulations required for adult daycare facilities — as they recently did for home-based childcare providers.
Osborn argued seniors don’t just need local programs like adult daycare; they deserve them.
“Everybody thinks that they know so much, but what our seniors can impart in wisdom is just staggering,” he said. “They’re such a valuable resource to the state, and yet they’re discarded.”
