Note: Whether it’s health care, retirement benefits, family support and child care, VA benefits or other programs, getting smart about the rewards you have earned is worth your time. Although it is not yet clear to what extent federal cuts will affect DOD programs — including quality-of-life initiatives — these benefits were in place as of this writing.
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Military families have many of the same needs as their civilian counterparts, but problems such as spouse unemployment and lack of child care are often exacerbated by frequent moves and deployments that come with military life.
DOD and service officials have been working to improve quality of life for those families, especially by tackling spouse unemployment and child care shortages.
Bases worldwide offer families a wide variety of support services, from legal assistance and tax preparation to education and employment assistance, financial counseling, relocation assistance and much more.
To find out more about what’s available, start with the family centers on military installations or MilitaryOneSource.mil, which offers additional assistance by phone or chat, 24 hours a day.
Most of the information on Military OneSource is available to the public, but some extra services are available for free to service members and their immediate family members, survivors of deceased service members and certain others. Retiring or separating service members and their immediate family members can also use these services for one year after they leave the service.
Among those services are non-medical counseling — available in person, by phone, secure chat or video session — as well as financial counseling, including free tax preparation and tax filing help.
Spouse employment and education services, language translation services for documents, health and wellness coaching, child/youth behavioral counseling and family life counseling are also available.
Spouse employment and education
Spouses can visit their installation’s family center for employment and education assistance. They can also visit the Spouse Education and Career Opportunities, or SECO, section at MilitaryOneSource.mil for information about scholarships and other education and employment needs. SECO offers a free, personalized benefit through certified career counselors to help spouses investigate career options, education options or entrepreneurial projects.
Through DOD’s My Career Advancement Account program, or MyCAA, spouses of certain service members can receive tuition assistance of up to $4,000, with an annual cap of $2,000, to pursue licenses, certifications or associate degrees needed for employment in any career field or occupation. Spouses may also use their MyCAA scholarship at an approved institution to help with the costs of national tests for course credits required for a degree approved under the MyCAA program.
This benefit was expanded to include more spouses, and is now available to spouses of active duty members at the grades of E-1 to E-9, W-1 to W-3, and O-1 to O-3.
Spouses married to members of the National Guard and reserves in the same pay grades are also eligible. Spouses can check their eligibility by visiting the MyCAA scholarship website and applying for an account. Military spouses remain eligible for this financial assistance if their military sponsor is promoted beyond the eligible ranks, as long as they already have an approved education-and-training plan in place through the program.
Spouses can also search job opportunities on the Military Spouse Employment Partnership site, where hundreds of employers, vetted by the Defense Department, are looking to hire military spouses.
More than 950 employers are MSEP partners. As the number has grown over the past decade, those employers have hired more than 360,000 military spouses across every employment sector, according to DOD. A number of these employers have remote work opportunities. In addition, through Military OneSource, spouses can get a free one-year membership to FlexJobs, a career platform that specializes in flexible and remote job openings.
Many military spouses spend time and money getting new professional licenses when they move to a new state. It costs money to sit for exams, plus other fees and the potential of lost pay as they go through the relicensing process. To help with these expenses, the law allows service members to apply to their service branch for reimbursement of up to $1,000 for their spouse’s relicensing and recertification costs each time they relocate on military orders. This also applies to reimbursement for certain business costs.
The Department of Labor offers information about state professional licensing requirements, specifically for military spouses.
A paid fellowship program allows spouses to be placed with civilian companies seeking full-time employees. The Military Spouse Career Accelerator Pilot Program is free to employers, and DOD will pay spouses during their 12-week fellowships. The program is entering its third year; placing more than 900 spouses into fellowships as of January 2025.
The accelerator pilot is open to spouses of currently serving members of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Space Force, to include the active, reserve and National Guard components. The hope is that companies will hire the spouses at the end of their 12-week fellowships. To date, about 80% of participants have been offered full-time employment with their host companies.
Spouses interested in applying can visit the Military OneSource Spouse Education and Career Opportunities accelerator pilot page.
Companies interested in hosting a military spouse fellow can learn more and sign up through the Hiring Our Heroes website page for employers.The fellowship program is administered by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
Child care
The Defense Department’s child care systems include more than 700 child development centers, facilities for school-age children and a number of family child care homes at more than 230 locations worldwide. All are required to adhere to DOD regulations. These programs are nationally recognized for their quality, and programs meet strict standards for curriculum, safety and health.
There has long been a shortage of affordable, high-quality child care for military families, just as there is a shortage nationwide. Although the military is building more child development centers, officials argue the problem can’t be solved by construction alone and have launched various initiatives, like staffing incentives, to ease the care crunch.
Child care fees are set on a sliding scale based on total family income, to include spouse income and other sources, and are the same regardless of a child’s age. For example, the standard fee is $54 a week for a family with a total family income of $45,001 or less.
Families can learn more about the child care options offered at or near their installation at the official DOD website, MilitaryChildCare.com. The website gives parents more visibility into the available child care slots at multiple installations in a given area, and allows them to register and apply for child care in advance. Families can submit unlimited requests for child care and remain on waitlists for a preferred program even after being offered care elsewhere.
Working military families receive higher priority in child care programs under DOD policy. The policy also allows officials to displace children who are already in a child development program if their parents are in a lower-priority category, and the gaining family expects to be on a wait list for more than 45 days after the time they need care.
Military families may also find child care through family-run sites in on-base homes, which undergo rigorous certification, inspection and oversight. Any family-run child care provider on an installation who offers child care for other families’ kids for at least 10 hours a week must be certified through installation officials. Families can get lists of certified home day cares at their installation’s child development program office, and on the MilitaryChildCare.com website.
Military families can also find high-quality, subsidized child care in their local civilian community if care is not available on base. Families must register at the MilitaryChildCare.com website for fee assistance through the program, operated through the nonprofit Child Care Aware of America.
In another option for finding hourly and on-demand child care, families can receive a paid subscription to a service that lets them search for child care providers through Military OneSource. DOD covers the cost of the subscription.
In the past few years, Congress has authorized funding to build more child development centers — 16 in fiscal 2023, and nine in the fiscal 2024 defense policy law. It generally takes about five years to finish construction and open the facilities.
The Pentagon and the services are looking at new ways to ease the child care shortage, such as streamlining the hiring process for new staff and offering workers better pay and benefits. Officials argue staffing shortages are a major factor in the scarcity of child care facilities.
Congress has also approved a DOD pilot program that provides fee assistance for in-home child care. It’s currently available in 12 regions, with limited spaces available. Find more information at MilitaryChildCare.com.
Tax-savings accounts for child care
To help ease the cost of child care for military families, DOD began offering the dependent care flexible spending account program for calendar year 2024. Service members for the first time could opt to have part of their pay set aside in a spending account to reimburse eligible expenses.
Active duty members and Active Guard Reserve members on Title 10 orders who pay for the care of an eligible dependent may use the benefit. Eligible dependents include children under age 13, or dependents of any age if they are physically or mentally incapable of caring for themselves.
This is a pre-tax benefit account used to help pay for eligible dependent care services, such as preschool, summer day camp, before or after school programs and child or adult day care. Married couples filing joint tax returns can set aside $100 to $5,000 to help pay for those expenses. Since it’s deducted from pay and put into the account before taxes, it reduces the overall tax burden. Claims can be submitted for dependent care expenses to be reimbursed from that account.
You can enroll online through the Federal Flexible Spending Account Program, known as FSAFEDS, sponsored by the Office of Personnel Management.
Enrollment is available only during the annual Federal Benefits Open Season — mid-November through mid-December — or when experiencing a qualifying life event such as the birth or adoption of a child.
Schools for military children
In the fall of 2024, the Department of Defense Education Activity opened universal pre-kindergarten classes for 4-year-olds at 80 of its primary schools on bases around the world. The remaining 10 primary schools in the DODEA system will get pre-K over the next several years, pending construction and renovation.
Once pre-K classes have arrived in all 90 primary schools, an estimated 6,000 4-year-olds will be eligible. Any child who will be age 4 on or before Sept. 1 of a coming school year may enroll.
The first schools for military children were established by the Army overseas after World War II, about 75 years ago. Now, DODEA operates 161 accredited schools in 9 districts located in 11 foreign countries, seven states, Guam and Puerto Rico, serving more than 67,000 children of active duty military and DOD civilian families.
Students at these DOD schools continued to score at the top of the nation in 4th and 8th grade math and reading scores, according to results released Jan. 29.
The average scores of students in Department of Defense Education Activity schools ranged from 14 to 25 points higher than the national averages in math and reading in the two grades of students who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. DODEA students were ranked at the top of the states in each of the tests.
More active-duty military parents will soon be able to enroll their children in DOD schools operated on bases in the contiguous United States — even if they live off base. A new law will allow full-time, active duty service members assigned to specific installations to request that their children be enrolled in the school operated by the DOD, regardless of whether they live on base. Children may be allowed to attend the school if space is available.
The change will apply only to families at certain bases. In the coming months, service officials and officials with the Department of Defense Education Activity will decide which bases will participate in the new program.
The program ends the blanket requirement that students must live on the installation to qualify for attendance at these schools, which are generally valued by military families for their academic achievement scores and programs for military children.
Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book "A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families." She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.
