The side jobs that work for daycare teachers are the ones that fit around a center schedule: evening and weekend babysitting, summer camp and recreation programs, tutoring, substitute shifts at other centers and selling curriculum materials online.
The context is baseline pay.
The national median for childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) was $16.82 an hour in May 2025, per BLS OEWS.
Here is what each option involves, and the checks to clear before you take one.
Side jobs that fit a center schedule
A center schedule runs from early opening to late pickup, and your classroom owns the daytime hours.
That rules out the obvious daytime options and leaves a clear pattern: the side jobs that fit start after pickup, run on weekends, or follow the school calendar.
The recurring candidates:
- Evening and weekend babysitting. Date nights, weekend days and overnights sit entirely outside center hours, and they draw directly on the skills you already use at work.
- Summer camp and recreation programs. Park districts, day camps and before- and after-school programs hire for exactly the hours a center schedule leaves open — more in the summer section below.
- Tutoring. Late-afternoon and weekend sessions for the pre-K and early-elementary skills you already teach every morning.
- Substitute shifts at other centers. A program that comes up short for a day needs a trained teacher on short notice, and a substitute pool lets you say when you are available.
- Selling curriculum materials online. The activity plans and classroom resources you already design, listed on marketplaces for teacher-made materials — slow to build, but it runs on hours nobody else wants.
What none of these comes with is a verified rate.
BLS OEWS wage data describes employer payrolls — what centers and schools pay — not what a babysitter charges by the hour or a curriculum seller makes in a year.
The closest published anchor for camp and after-school work is recreation workers (SOC 39-9032), the occupation BLS says covers many before/after-school and camp staff: a May 2025 median of $17.58 an hour, or $36,560 a year.
Read it as the neighborhood the work lives in, not a paycheck you can plan around.
For scale, the base job itself: childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) earned a May 2025 median of $16.82 an hour — $34,980 a year — and preschool teachers (SOC 25-2011) earned $18.34 an hour, or $38,140 a year.
If the side job is meant to close a real monthly gap rather than fund a hobby, start from the math of living on a daycare salary and work backward to how many hours you actually need to sell.
Babysitting center families: policies
Babysitting is the side job closest to your day job, and the friction point is whose family it is.
Sitting for a family you already know from the center is convenient on both sides — the trust is built — but it touches the center's own rules about staff and the families it serves, and those rules are written center by center.
Before you say yes to a sitting request from a center family:
- Read your employee handbook for an outside-employment, moonlighting or non-solicitation section — that is where a babysitting policy would live.
- Ask your director directly, and get the answer in writing.
- Keep the arrangement off center time and center systems: no recruiting on the floor, and no using contact information or files from work.
- Protect the day job: an overnight that leaves you short on sleep shows up in your classroom by mid-morning.
How centers handle staff babysitting for center families is not something our research could verify: we found no verified source describing what common center non-solicitation or outside-employment policies say.
The reliable answer for your situation is your own handbook and your own director, not a general rule.
Keep it a side income, too.
Regular nannying for one family, or turning sitting into a home daycare of your own, is a career change with its own requirements — not a weekend add-on.
Our nanny vs daycare teacher comparison covers that fork.
There is a reason BLS cannot quote you a babysitting rate.
BLS counted about 1.0 million childcare-worker jobs in 2025 — 24% of them self-employed and 17% in private households — and its OEWS wage survey excludes both groups, so none of its medians describes private-household sitting.
What self-employed childcare workers earn, BLS says, depends on the hours they work and the number and ages of the children in their care.
Beyond those drivers, BLS publishes no figure, so there is no national table to check your rate against.
A written OK protects both sides
Summer work
Summer side jobs for teachers assume a break that center staff may not have.
BLS notes that preschool teachers in daycare settings may work year-round with longer hours, so a summer side job has to fit around your center's own summer enrollment rather than around a two-month gap.
The classic summer-off window is the one BLS describes for school-based teachers: many public-school preschool teachers work the traditional 10-month school year with a 2-month summer break.
If your summers do leave room, the natural fits follow the school-age kids out of school: park district and day-camp counselor jobs, town recreation programs, extended tutoring for children who need the repetition, and extra babysitting hours while school-age siblings are home.
The pay anchor BLS publishes for this corner of the field is recreation workers (SOC 39-9032) — the occupation that covers many camp and before/after-school staff — at a median of $17.58 an hour in May 2025, or $36,560 a year.
It is a broad occupational median, not a camp paycheck, and a summer-only job is a supplement, not a second salary.
One more option runs through the center itself: if your program runs its own summer camp, picking up extra weeks there keeps you inside one schedule, one commute and one employer — and extra hours at your current rate need nobody's sign-off but your director's.
Online side income
Online income is the side job that costs no extra commute and runs whenever your schedule has a gap.
The realistic online side hustle for preschool and daycare teachers starts from work you already do:
- Selling curriculum materials. Activity plans, circle-time sequences, small-group games and printable classroom resources you designed yourself, sold through marketplaces for teacher-made materials. Sell only what is yours: published curricula are licensed products, and anything your center built is your center's to clear first.
- Online tutoring. Early-reading and early-math help for pre-K through early-elementary children, on video, in the evening — the same skills tutoring has always used, without the drive.
- Education writing and reviewing. Drafting activity content or reviewing children's media as a freelancer is the least standardized of the three: our research found no verified picture of that market, so treat any gig you find as a one-off until you can check the buyer.
The honest caveat: none of these has a verified earnings figure behind it.
Our research found no data on what teacher-sellers or online tutors actually earn, and a marketplace success story is marketing copy until you can check it.
Price your own hours before you commit — an online side hustle that pays less per hour than picking up a center shift is a hobby with extra steps.
Working two childcare jobs
The last option stays in the field twice: a weekday center job plus evening or weekend work at another program — a before- and after-school site, a weekend shift at a second center, or a substitute pool.
Your skills transfer completely, references come easy, and you already know how to walk into a strange classroom and run it.
The cost is energy.
Two childcare jobs is a scheduling decision first and a money decision second — treat real rest as part of the plan, not a luxury.
Substitute pools are built for exactly this: you tell the pool which days you are free, and it calls when a room comes up short.
What they pay is the part we cannot verify: our research found no verified figures for state substitute-pool program pay or app-based staffing pay, so ask any pool you join for its current rates in writing.
For how substitute work is benchmarked, see our substitute pay page.
A second employer stands on its own.
Your weekday center's schedule, policies and pay do not carry over automatically, and its approval of your second job — if your handbook requires one — is worth getting the same way the babysitting OK is: in writing, before you start.
Under federal wage rules, a typical licensed child care center is not automatically an "educational establishment," so its teachers are generally non-exempt — hourly and overtime-eligible — unless state law treats the program as elementary education; how hours and breaks get counted is its own topic, covered in our overtime and breaks guide.
If you want a second center job rather than a side business, the direct route is the childcare teacher jobs board: browse childcare teacher jobs near you and see which programs staff the hours you have free.
This page is career information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Pay and hours questions are governed by federal and state wage rules administered by the U.S. Department of Labor and state labor agencies — confirm the specifics with them and with your own center before you take on outside work.