Tennessee's Childcare Quality Rating System: What It Means for Directors and Staff

Tennessee's quality rating system runs under rule chapter 1240-04-07, in the Tennessee Department of Human Services' child care rules.

The rule says a child care agency shall receive an annual quality rating improvement system score, so this is not a voluntary badge: as written, the score reaches every licensed agency, and Tennessee's child care agencies include centers, group homes, family homes and drop-in centers.

The old Star-Quality star ratings no longer apply — the rule's star sections were repealed effective June 29, 2022, and the current rule scores agencies on a 100-point scale.

TDHS's provider page for the program still carries the star-quality name in its web address, which is one reason the older name lingers in searches.

There are no star levels to climb.

The current rule produces one annual overall score: each quarterly visit is scored out of 100, and once the fourth visit is complete the four scores are averaged into the overall score for the child care agency.

The bands our research finds in the current rule are the certificate-program bonus bands in the payment rule — a score of 80-90 and a score of 90-100 — and those are payment thresholds, not star tiers.

The 1-3 star ratings of the old Star-Quality system ended with the 2022 repeal, so a Tennessee agency's public quality result today is a number, not a star tier.

The rule names the two component areas the annual score rests on: Health and Safety and Teacher/Child Interactions.

Beyond naming those areas, our research did not confirm a published points breakdown, a set of staff credentials that add points, or training hours that raise the score, so this page names none.

Staff training rules sit in Tennessee's licensure chapter (1240-04-01), separate from the quality chapter (1240-04-07) that sets the annual score.

How visit points are awarded inside each component area is a question for TDHS Child Care Services.

Our research did not confirm a named classroom observation instrument for Tennessee's visits, so this page names none.

What the rule does establish is the measurement frame: an annual score built from four quarterly monitoring visits measuring Health and Safety and Teacher/Child Interactions, with each visit scored out of 100 and the four averaged.

If you are weighing staff training around a specific assessment instrument, ask TDHS Child Care Services what its monitors actually use before you spend the hours.

For the agency, the rule sets a bonus payment tied to the certificate program's base rate: an agency attaining an annual Quality Rating Improvement System score of 80-90 receives the base rate plus 15% of the base rate as a bonus payment, and a score of 90-100 earns the base rate plus 20%.

For staff, our research did not confirm a state bonus tied to the agency's score.

The staff-side supplement our research found in Tennessee is Child Care WAGE$, administered by Signal Centers, and it is education-based rather than rating-based: eligibility keys to the supplement scale's education levels and to working in a TDHS-licensed program with children birth to 5 for at least 10 classroom hours a week over six or more months at one program.

As of 2025, directors' and assistant directors' administrative hours count as eligible.

The cadence does most of the defining.

Monitoring comes four times a year, each visit scored out of 100 and averaged into the annual overall score, so the result reflects practice across the whole year rather than a single visit.

The two areas the visits measure — Health and Safety and Teacher/Child Interactions — are ones a director can watch in ordinary operation: daily health and safety routines, and the quality of adult-child interactions in each room.

The score is also public inside the building, because TDHS says agencies must post their report score card with the renewal license where parents can clearly see them — staff and the families the agency serves can see the number alongside the license.

Because our research did not confirm the detailed visit criteria, ask TDHS Child Care Services how points are awarded before building training plans around assumptions.