What Qualifications Do You Need to Be a Daycare Director in Alabama?

Director qualifications are licensing rules, and in Alabama they come from the Alabama Department of Human Resources (DHR) Child Care Services Division.

DHR licenses child care centers under the Alabama Administrative Code chapter for centers, and the director qualifications sit in rule 660-5-26-.06 of that chapter; family and group day care homes are licensed under a separate chapter, so this page is about center directors.

One scope note matters for job seekers: church-ministry preschools and religious nonprofit school programs can operate license-exempt if they meet DHR's notice, inspection, background-check and insurance conditions, so the qualifications below describe licensed centers, and a director posting at an exempt program can carry different requirements.

Alabama's rule does not require a degree on every route.

Two of the four routes run on a high school diploma or GED: one adds 120 clock hours of child care training, and the other adds a Child Development Associate (CDA) credential or the Certified Childcare Professional (CCP) certificate from the National Child Care Association.

The other two routes are college degrees in child development or early childhood education — an associate degree or a bachelor's degree.

In the routes as our research transcribes them, no route names a specific number of college credit hours; the degree or the training hours are what the rule counts.

Experience is the variable that moves with education.

The 120-clock-hour route and the CDA or CCP route each ask for at least 12 months of working experience on top of a high school diploma or GED.

An associate degree in child development or early childhood education brings the minimum to at least 9 months, and a bachelor's in the same fields to at least 6 months.

The rule text our research transcribed sets the minimums by route but does not define how qualifying months are counted, so a candidate or a center should confirm documentation questions with DHR's Child Care Services Division.

No credential is required on every route.

What runs across all four is a fixed baseline: a director must be at least 19 years old and hold at least 20 clock hours of training in administration and management plus at least 4 clock hours in quality child care.

When a candidate uses the credential route, the rule accepts a Child Development Associate (CDA) credential — awarded by the Council for Professional Recognition — or the Certified Childcare Professional (CCP) certificate from the National Child Care Association, paired with a high school diploma or GED and at least 12 months of working experience.

Alabama directors must complete at least 24 clock hours of training each year, twice the 12 clock hours required of the center's teachers, and CPR and first aid training do not count toward those hours.

Before starting, the rule adds a pre-service layer that covers directors along with the center's teachers, aides, service staff and substitutes: at least 1 hour of training from an outside source in each of 11 health and safety topics — SIDS and safe sleep, medication administration, shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma, child abuse reporting, and first aid and CPR among them — then at least 1 hour per topic every year.

The rules also set an August 1, 2022 deadline for directors to complete an orientation on the assessment tools used by the state's Quality Rating and Improvement System.

Renewal runs on two clocks: the 24 training hours come due every year, and background clearances — FBI and state fingerprint checks, national and state sex offender registry checks, and a State Central Registry child abuse and neglect clearance — renew every five years.

The center rules answer this one directly.

When the director is absent, a staff person meeting at least child care worker qualifications must be designated as the responsible person in charge, and that person's name must be posted.

Child care worker/teacher is the rule's title for the lead classroom role — at least 18 years old, a high school diploma or GED, and 12 hours of child care training within 30 days of hire.

Our research did not surface a separate Alabama assistant-director credential or license category, so treat an assistant-director posting as the center's own title and confirm designation questions with DHR.

Yes.

Alabama's own center rules set an August 1, 2022 deadline for the director, teachers, aides and assistant teachers, all service staff and all substitutes to be enrolled in the Alabama Pathways Professional Development Registry.

The mandate is the state's licensing rule, not a federal one: federal CCDF rules ask states to plan a training and professional development framework that addresses workforce information, but they do not require individual staff to join a registry.

DHR has posted proposed new Child Care Licensing and Performance Standards — a center draft dated 8-26-21 and a homes draft posted in 2026.

Those are proposals, not adopted law, and this page describes the adopted rules in the Alabama Administrative Code chapters now in force.

If DHR adopts new standards, the qualifications described here could change, so confirm the current rules with the Child Care Services Division before you rely on them.