The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), provides cash payments to childcare providers that serve nutritious meals and snacks to eligible children enrolled in these settings. CACFP is a critical component of the Federal food safety net, serving meals and snacks to more than 4 million children enrolled in participating childcare centers and day care homes (USDA FNS n.d.). Providers in a variety of childcare settings operate CACFP. Programs that participate in CACFP not only provide food to children but also improve the nutritional quality of children's dietary intake (Gurzo et al. 2020; Ritchie et al. 2012; Zaltz et al. 2020); moreover, program participation in CACFP results in food cost savings for families (Andreyeva et al. 2022). Understanding program participation is important because providers that decide to participate in a program are typically not representative of the entire target population of that program. In this study, we systematically examined childcare providers' participation in CACFP across the United States. This secondary data analysis is part of a two-component approach designed to describe characteristics of all childcare settings and how they differ based on CACFP participation. A complementary literature review pointed to the need for (1) nationally representative studies that build on existing research, which largely focus on specific geographic regions, and (2) research focused on providers that do not participate in CACFP (Eiffes et al. under review). The present study uses existing data from a nationally representative survey of childcare centers and home-based providers to examine how the characteristics of providers, their settings, and their communities predict participation in CACFP.