Asking for a raise at a daycare works best as a scheduled conversation, not a hallway wish: you pick a moment when your value is visible, you bring your credentials and the pay other centers are posting, and you make one specific ask.
This page gives you the timing, the evidence to bring, a script you can adapt, and the moves to make if the budget cannot move.
When should you ask for a raise at a daycare?
Timing decides half of this conversation.
Ask after a documented win — a completed credential, duties you took on, a strong written evaluation — and before your center plans its pay for the coming year, while a raise is still a line item your director can put in the budget.
The worst moment is when money already feels tight in the building: enrollment is soft, a teacher just quit, and your director is covering the classroom themselves.
A raise ask landing in a staffing crisis reads as pressure, and pressure gets polite delays rather than raises.
If you are newer to the role and no review cycle has come around yet, anchor the ask to a milestone instead of time served — a training course you finished, an age group you were certified to work with, a room you kept covered through a stretch of call-outs.
One scope note before the script: this page is about the raise you have earned in the job you already hold.
Negotiating a starting offer at a new center is a different conversation, with different leverage and a different script.
What to bring: credentials, duties and the market pay data
Walk in with two folders.
The first is your value: the duties you carry that were not in your original job description, the training you completed, the credential you earned, the rooms you keep covered.
Put dates on all of it — a raise case is stronger as a timeline than as a feeling.
If a credential is part of the story, price it before you set your number.
Our page on the CDA pay increase walks through what the verified data does and does not show for CDA holders, including the credential-linked minimum salaries and education supplements that attach to the credential in the states and cities that fund them.
The second folder is the market.
Childcare workers (SOC 39-9011), the federal line that covers aides, assistant teachers and many lead teachers in centers, earned a national median of $16.82 an hour ($34,980 a year) in May 2025, and preschool teachers (SOC 25-2011), the line for lead and pre-K teachers, $18.34 an hour ($38,140 a year) — both from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey.
The spread around those medians is wide: the 10th percentile of childcare workers earned $11.66 an hour in May 2025 and the 90th percentile $22.12.
A spread that wide is exactly why the national number is context and your local market is the evidence.
Two places to get local numbers.
Our daycare teacher pay data carries the BLS rows for your state, and the live childcare teacher jobs board shows what nearby centers are posting for your role right now — that is the number your director is quietly competing with.
What the research does not give you is a magic percentage.
Our research found no verified national figure for typical raise sizes in childcare, or for how much more a lead teacher makes than an assistant — so treat any quoted standard raise with caution.
Build your number from the postings and the data instead.
One verified data point does exist for what a raise looks like at scale: Bright Horizons reported 2025 average hourly wage rate increases of 3-4% in its full-service center segment, per its annual report.
Treat that as context for what a large operator reported for last year, not as a target your director owes you.
A sample script for asking your daycare for a raise
Whoever sets pay at your center — the owner or the director — hears wishes every week.
What lands is a scheduled, specific, dated ask.
Adapt this one to the folders you built in the last section.
Open with the meeting, not the money
“Could we put fifteen minutes on the calendar this week to talk about my pay?” You are signaling a professional conversation, not an ambush in the doorway at pickup time.
Tie the ask to your value
“Since I finished my CDA in the spring, I’ve taken over the infant room’s documentation and covered lead duties when we’re short. I want my pay to reflect the role I’m actually doing.” Name the duties, the credential and the dates — this is the first folder speaking.
Bring the market, not a complaint
“Centers near us are posting [the rate you found] for this role, and I’m asking to move my pay toward it.” Market data turns a feeling into an arithmetic problem your director can actually solve.
Make one specific ask, then stop talking
“I’m asking for my rate to move to [your number] by [date]. Can you tell me what’s possible?” Then be quiet. Silence after a specific ask is uncomfortable, and filling it with a smaller fallback offer is how raises shrink before they are even discussed.
If the answer is not today, get the condition
“What would need to be true for this to work — enrollment, my next credential, the next budget cycle? Can we put a date on revisiting this?” A condition with a date converts a warm maybe into a follow-up you can actually make.
Write down what was agreed before you leave the room: the number, the date, the condition.
A raise promise with a date is a plan you can follow up on.
A warm maybe is a conversation you will be having again in three months.
If your daycare can't pay more
Sometimes the no is real, and it helps to understand the economics before you assume bad faith.
We lay out the verified wage data behind the sector’s tight budgets in our page on why childcare workers are paid so little.
A no today is not the same as a no forever — which is why the last beat of the script asks for the condition.
If the condition is enrollment, ask what the center needs filled and by when.
If it is your next credential, get the date that credential lands in your file.
Then follow up on that date without re-fighting the whole conversation.
Benefits asks hit the same wall at a small center, and it is worth knowing why.
Under federal law (26 U.S.C. 4980H), the ACA employer coverage penalty reaches only applicable large employers — those that employed an average of at least 50 full-time employees (including equivalents) in the prior calendar year — so a center below that size is not subject to it, one reason why a small center may have no group health plan to upgrade in the first place.
The constraint is structural, not personal.
One lever sits outside your director’s budget entirely: where a state wage-supplement program exists, the state — or a contractor it funds — adds money to eligible early educators’ income on top of the paycheck their program already pays.
Whether one operates where you live — and what it pays — is in our overview of wage supplement programs.
Non-wage asks: planning time, schedule, PTO and a childcare discount
When the wage line is stuck, negotiate everything around it.
These asks cost a center less than a permanent wage line does, and each one is real money or real time for you.
- Paid planning time outside the classroom: non-contact hours for curriculum, documentation and family messages, instead of time that comes out of your evening.
- A fixed schedule or the shifts that fit your life, written into the calendar instead of negotiated week to week.
- Additional paid time off, or paid days around the holidays the center runs short — see what an employer package can include in our page on paid time off for childcare workers.
- A lead-teacher title where the duties you already carry match the role, so the next pay decision has a label to attach to.
- Funding for the CDA, a course or a degree — the ask that raises your market value even when it does not raise this year’s paycheck.
- Reduced-cost childcare at your own center if you have a child of your own — how centers structure it is on our page about free childcare for staff.
One check before you accept a childcare discount as the win: the federal dependent care assistance exclusion (IRC section 129) limit was raised from $5,000 to $7,500 ($3,750 married filing separately) by 2025 legislation (Pub.
L. 119-21), and employer-provided child care discounts beyond that exclusion may be taxable.
How a specific discount is treated is a payroll question — the center’s payroll provider or a tax professional can answer it for your situation.
Career information, not legal or tax advice
When to look elsewhere for a childcare pay increase
There is a ceiling a conversation cannot move, and the federal wage data shows what moving employers can do about it.
In May 2025, preschool teachers (SOC 25-2011) working in elementary and secondary schools earned a median of $27.29 an hour ($56,750 a year), versus $17.72 an hour ($36,850 a year) for those in child care services, the BLS industry category centers fall in.
Childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) show the same pattern: $16.43 an hour ($34,170 a year) in child care services, and $17.80 an hour in elementary and secondary schools.
Read those numbers for what they are: BLS industry medians for May 2025, not promises — the school-based category spans all ownerships, including public-school settings, and your state’s rows will differ.
They are still the strongest verified signal we have that the same teaching skills are priced differently in different settings, and that the gap is wider than one raise conversation closes.
Three signals it is time to use the market folder somewhere else: the date your director set came and went; the postings you brought to the table describe your job and pay visibly more; or the credential you earned changed nothing at a center that has no lead-teacher line to move you into.
Moving is not failure — it is the same negotiation with a program that has an open seat.
Our page on how to get a job at a daycare walks the application-to-offer path, and the market folder you built for the raise conversation becomes your interview evidence.
This page is career information, not licensing, legal or tax advice. Pay and benefit questions — including anything about your own situation — are worth confirming with your state child care licensing agency or the agency named for the rule in question.