Does Pre-K tuition count as child care expenses on taxes?

sure why not

Depends if you are referring to Federal or Louisiana.

Federal - Pre-K counts as eligible spending for child care credit / Dependent Care FSA. Kindergarten doesn't (but before/after school care would count).

LA - The LA school deduction starts with kindergarten.

You can set up a dcfsa with your employer and pay pre-k expenses.

Both parents need to be working or able to show why they couldn’t otherwise care for the child (such as a medical event).

We made too much for it to help anyway, kids didn’t help us out at all for tax purposes

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If I take the standard deduction do I even need to bother listing child care expenses on my federal return?

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It’s a credit not a itemized deduction so yes

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You can set up a dcfsa with your employer and pay pre-k expenses.

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Not if it is at a catholic school as it’s considered tuition and not dependent care. I went through this when my son moved from pre-school to pre-K4. FSAs don’t allow payments to private schools, only day cares.

We were still far better off since pre-k4 tuition was far less than staying in day care.

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FSAs don’t allow payments to private schools, only day cares.

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I don't think this is right. We've used it for private school pre-k and the FSA was set up through my wife's employer which was a private school.

Qualified Expenses

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I would imagine it would have to do with how the school is licensed.

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That's possible. Ours does allow for religious schools, but that doesn't mean yours does.

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My FSA specially would not allow religious schools I can assure you.

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It sounds like the problem is with your FSA administration company, not the tax code and regs.

There is no legal distinction, for purposes of the credit / FSA eligibility, between a Pre-K run by a private company, or a religious organization, or a school that also has higher level grades.

The administrator might not understand what is happening here. Remember, in most parts of the country, pre-k students attend a nursery / primary school, not a catholic PreK - 7th grade school.