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

Director qualifications are licensing rules, and in Texas they come from the Child Care Regulation (CCR) department of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC).

The center rules are the Minimum Standards in 26 TAC Chapter 746, whose current edition was revised in December 2025.

Texas statute defines a day-care center as care at a location other than the operator's residence for seven or more children under 14, at least two hours a day, three or more days a week (Human Resources Code §42.002(7)).

The director standards scale with the size of the license: a center licensed for 13 or more children qualifies its director under §746.1015, and a center licensed for 12 or fewer children follows a lighter combination list in §746.1017.

For a center licensed for 13 or more children, every route starts the same way: a director who is at least 21 years old, holds a high school diploma or its equivalent, and meets one of seven combinations of education and experience.

Our research transcribes three of the seven.

Option 1 is a bachelor's degree with 12 college credit hours in child development and 6 in management, plus at least one year of experience in a licensed child-care center.

Option 7 drops the degree: nine college credit hours in child development and nine in management, with at least three years of center experience.

The third transcribed combination, option 5, runs through a credential instead.

College credits are not the only currency — 50 clock hours or five CEUs may substitute for every three required college credit hours in child development and management.

Experience is the variable that moves with education: the transcribed 13-or-more-children routes ask for at least one, two or three years in a licensed child-care center as the education requirement steps down from a bachelor's degree to college credit hours.

The rule counts a year narrowly.

Director experience qualifies only when it is full-time — at least 30 hours per week — or the part-time equivalent, and it may be paid or unpaid.

The small-center standard has its own flexibility: one §746.1017 combination accepts three years of experience in a licensed child-care center or a licensed or registered child-care home.

No single credential is required on every route — the degree and credit-hour combinations our research transcribes require none — so the credential question depends on the combination a candidate chooses.

The CDA, awarded by the Council for Professional Recognition, and the Certified Child-Care Professional credential enter through option 5, which pairs either credential with 6 college credit hours in management and at least two years of licensed-center experience.

Administration coursework runs through every route our research transcribes: management credit hours in options 1, 5 and 7, and 30 clock hours in management in the transcribed small-center combination.

As for the director's certificate itself, HHSC charges no fee to process one.

A Texas child-care center director completes 30 clock hours of annual training — six more than the 24 clock hours required of the center's caregivers.

Directors also hold the center's health-and-safety certificates: every caregiver and the director must hold current pediatric first aid, with rescue breathing and choking, and pediatric CPR certificates, and first aid is due within 90 days of employment and before unsupervised access to children.

On the director's certificate itself, our research transcribed the qualification and fee rules but not a renewal cycle, so ask Child Care Regulation what renewal currently requires.

Our research transcribed the standards the director must meet — age, education and experience, set by the size of the center's license — but did not confirm separate Texas rules naming an assistant director or a designee who may serve in the director's absence.

The gap is in our reading, not the rulebook: Chapter 746 may address designation, and centers should confirm designation questions with Child Care Regulation rather than assume the director standard transfers to another title.