The U.S. Census Bureau is exploring the possibility of developing a child care-inclusive poverty measure (CCIPM). A CCIPM that treats child care as a component of the measure’s “market basket” of basic needs departs from the Supplemental Poverty Measure’s (SPM) current treatment of child care as a work expense. Instead, a CCIPM would capture care purchased by working and non-working parents and unpaid care, as well as resources from public investment in child care (e.g., child care subsidies). In this paper, we define conceptual and measurement parameters for a child care basic need, including empirical support for setting a child care basic need amount by child age, type of care arrangement, and household geographic location. We also provide a demonstration of child care basic need, threshold values, and poverty rates using price data from the National Database of Childcare Prices and expense data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We find that constructing a child care basic need using child care price data result in thresholds higher, on average, than current SPM thresholds for resource units with child care expenses and a child under 13 years old. This results in a poverty rate that is higher for this group than their SPM poverty rate. Among all resource units, including those without child care expenses and without a qualifying child, the overall poverty rate increases.