Childcare pay is low because of how the business is built: state ratio rules fix how many adults each classroom needs, and tuition and public subsidies cap what those adults can be paid.
In May 2025 the national median wage for childcare workers was $16.82 an hour — $34,980 a year (BLS OEWS).
This page walks through the structure behind that number, and the settings where pay runs higher.
The short answer
Start with the number itself.
In May 2025, childcare workers — the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation (SOC 39-9011) that covers aides, assistants and many lead teachers in centers — earned a median of $16.82 an hour, or $34,980 a year.
The mean was $16.84, barely above the median — a spread that suggests the average is not being pulled far up by a small group of much-higher-paid staff.
The 10th percentile earned $11.66 an hour; the 90th percentile earned $22.12.
Is that underpaid?
The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) has measured the question directly: its 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index reports that 97% of other occupations are paid more than early educators.
The same index, using 2022 data, puts the median early-educator wage at $13.07 an hour.
That figure is a different measure from the OEWS number above — CSCCE draws on American Community Survey data that includes home-based providers — so treat the two as separate series, not a contradiction.
The short structural answer: a licensed classroom staffs to ratio, staffing is what a center fundamentally does, and the price of care — what families can pay in tuition and what public programs reimburse — sets a hard ceiling on wages.
Ratios and the cost of labor
Staff-to-child ratios — how many children each adult may care for — are set in each state's child care licensing rules for licensed centers.
Ratios turn labor into the industry's fixed ingredient.
A center cannot serve more children without hiring more staff, and it cannot cut staffing without cutting capacity — so the size of the payroll follows from the ratio rules before it follows from the budget.
The industry's own job mix shows how much of its employment sits in the classroom.
In May 2025, preschool teachers were 34.6% of all U.S. jobs in child care services (NAICS 6244), childcare workers 26.9%, teaching assistants 14.0% and center directors 6.0% — more than four-fifths of the industry's jobs in four titles.
Price competition pushes in the same direction.
Bright Horizons states in its 10-K that many competitors offer lower prices by using less intensive ratios and lower compensation and benefits.
When a center's rivals can undercut it by paying less, paying materially more becomes a competitive risk — and wages settle near what the price of care can carry.
One caveat about numbers you may have seen elsewhere: our research found no verified figure for the share of a center's budget spent on staff, so we won't quote one.
What the structure in this section shows is direction, not a percentage: ratios tie the size of the payroll to the size of the program.
What tuition and subsidies can cover
A center's revenue comes from a short list: what families pay in tuition, what public subsidy programs reimburse, and — for some classrooms — contracts with public pre-K and Head Start programs.
Every item on that list is priced somewhere other than the center: by what local families can afford, by each state's subsidy rules, or by a public program's funding.
When those prices hold still, payroll holds still with them.
That ceiling sits directly on top of the ratio math.
More staff per child means higher cost per child, and that cost has to come out of a price someone else is setting.
When the price side cannot move, the adjustment lands on compensation — which is what the wage data earlier on this page shows.
For the people doing the work, the squeeze shows up at home.
CSCCE's 2024 Workforce Index reports that 43% of early educator families rely on public safety-net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (2022 data).
The same index calculates that early educator wages fall short of a living wage for a single adult with no children in any state, with 2022 median wages ranging from $10.60 an hour in Louisiana to $18.23 in the District of Columbia.
This is the poverty side of the answer, and it is why "childcare worker poverty" travels alongside the wage statistics.
The work itself is skilled, continuous and regulated; the revenue model underneath it is not built to price any of that.
How it compares with K-12 and other jobs
Set the national BLS medians side by side and the gap is stark (all figures below are medians from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, May 2025):
- Childcare workers (SOC 39-9011): $16.82/hour — $34,980/year
- Preschool teachers (SOC 25-2011): $18.34/hour — $38,140/year
- Teaching assistants (SOC 25-9045 — BLS's teaching-assistant occupation: 72% of its jobs are in local elementary and secondary schools, so this is not a daycare-assistant pay figure): $36,780/year (BLS publishes annual wages only for this occupation)
- Kindergarten teachers (SOC 25-2012): $62,680/year, against the $38,140 preschool-teacher median
- Recreation workers (SOC 39-9032), the occupation that covers many before-school, after-school and camp staff: $17.58/hour — $36,560/year
State-by-state medians for the childcare titles live on the childcare teacher salary page.
The sharpest comparison is the same job in a different building.
Preschool teachers (25-2011) working in elementary and secondary schools earned a median of $27.29 an hour — $56,750 a year — in May 2025, against $17.72 an hour ($36,850) for preschool teachers in child care services.
Split by ownership, preschool teachers in local-government schools earned $61,300, in private elementary and secondary schools $44,290, and in child care services $36,850.
The two settings differ in other ways too.
BLS notes that preschool teachers typically need at least an associate degree, while public-school preschool teachers generally need a bachelor's degree and an early childhood license.
BLS also notes that many public-school preschool teachers work a traditional 10-month school year, while daycare settings may run year-round with longer hours — so for many school-based teachers, the higher annual median is earned over fewer months, not more.
CSCCE makes the cross-occupation comparison with its own data: its 2024 index reports early educators at a $13.07 median hourly wage against $31.80 for elementary and middle school teachers (2022 data).
What's changing: state wage supplements and pay parity
None of this rewrites the economics, but money is starting to move to the early childhood workforce through programs that take four shapes: supplements paid directly to workers, employer grants with wage-floor conditions, state pay floors and pay scales for publicly funded classrooms, and tax credits.
A sample of what states currently run:
- Education-based salary supplements. North Carolina's Child Care WAGE$ program, run by Early Years, Inc., pays supplements to teachers, directors and family child care providers working with children birth to 5 in participating counties. Eligibility requires working at least 10 hours a week, an education level on the WAGE$ scale, and income at or below the local cap — $19, $23 or $25 an hour, set by the county's Smart Start partnership and fixed until June 2027. Payment comes after each completed six-month commitment period at the same program, and Early Years reports an average six-month supplement of $1,285. The T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood National Center's directory lists WAGE$-model programs in other states, including Florida (as INCENTIVE$), Iowa and Tennessee.
- Monthly stipends tied to a registry. Maine's Early Childhood Educator Workforce Salary Supplement pays $240, $360 or $540 a month through licensed programs, by the employee's Maine (MRTQ) registry level.
- Employer grants with wage floors. Illinois Smart Start Workforce Grants condition funding on wage floors in grant-funded center classrooms: for FY27 Round 1 (July–September 2026), lead teachers at $19.25/hour in Group 1A counties (including Cook, DuPage and Lake), $18.50 in Group 1B and $18.25 in Group 2 — with assistants at $18.00, $17.25 and $17.00.
- A state pay floor. Washington, DC's Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund sets minimum salaries that participating facilities must pay, unless OSSE approves a waiver. FY2026 minimums, from January 1, 2026: $48,736 ($23.43/hour) for a lead teacher with a CDA, $60,678 ($29.17/hour) with an ECE associate degree or 12 ECE credits, and $71,010 ($34.14/hour) with an ECE bachelor's or a bachelor's plus 12 ECE credits. Facilities are not required to join — and the minimums themselves were reduced effective January 1, 2026, with OSSE warning educators that their pay may go down as a result.
- Tax credits. Colorado's Early Childhood Educator Income Tax Credit paid $852–$1,705 for tax year 2024 by credential level, with income and program-rating conditions; Nebraska's refundable School Readiness Tax Credit pays $2,300–$3,500 by professional-record level, CPI-adjusted from tax year 2025 and subject to an aggregate cap.
Publicly funded pre-K classrooms can also carry school-style pay into center-based jobs.
Georgia publishes an actual salary schedule that applies to its private Pre-K providers too, prorated to the program year: for FY2027, lead teachers with an ECE bachelor's start at $41,717 and rise to $56,812 with experience, and assistant teachers are funded at $25,741.35 for 2026-27.
DECAL, the state agency that runs Georgia Pre-K, says lead teachers moved onto the K-12 salary scale in state fiscal year 2025 — a 16% raise — and assistant pay rose by $5,551.
Head Start's rule reaches further than any of the state programs above.
The 2024 Head Start Program Performance Standards (45 CFR 1302.90) require programs, by August 1, 2031, to pay each Head Start teacher an annual salary at least comparable to public-school preschool teachers in the local school district, adjusted for qualifications, experience and hours.
The same rule requires, by the same date, a salary floor it describes as "generally sufficient to cover basic needs" and pay that does not differ by the age of the children served.
By August 1, 2028, programs must also offer full-time staff (30+ hours a week) health coverage or access to it, paid leave, and access to low-cost behavioral health services, with an exemption for agencies with 200 or fewer funded slots.
Treat all of that as current but contested, not settled.
On May 12, 2026, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) proposed deleting the wage and benefit requirements in 1302.90(e) and (f); comments closed June 11, 2026.
On August 7, 2026, ACF proposed rescinding and replacing the Head Start Performance Standards entirely, with comments due October 6, 2026.
Until a final rule publishes, the existing standards stay in effect, and a removal would take effect 60 days after a final rule.
Confirm program amounts with the agency that runs them
Where childcare workers earn more
The industry data points at three levers.
The first is the building you work in.
The same preschool-teacher occupation paid a median of $56,750 in elementary and secondary schools in May 2025, against $36,850 in child care services — and $61,300 in local-government schools.
That is the public-school and state pre-K teacher side of the field.
For aides and assistants the setting gap is smaller but real: childcare workers (39-9011) in child care services earned a median of $16.43 an hour ($34,170 a year), against $17.80 an hour in elementary and secondary schools.
In individual and family services — the industry category that includes many Head Start grantees — preschool teachers earned a median of $45,550.
BLS does not publish pay for Head Start as a separate industry, so treat any "Head Start teacher salary" figure you see online with caution; the grantee's own job posting is the better source.
The second lever is role.
Center directors (SOC 11-9031) earned a national median of $28.51 an hour — $59,300 a year — in May 2025, and the employer gap is wider still: directors in child care services earned $58,090 against $90,950 for directors employed by local-government schools.
In the same data, directors out-earn classroom staff by a wide margin.
The third lever is what funds the classroom.
Georgia's model — public pre-K money carrying a school salary schedule into private centers — is a clear example of a state attaching its pay scale to publicly funded classrooms; other states attach wage floors to grants or pay supplements to workers instead, as the last section shows.
When you compare job offers, ask what funds the room: tuition, subsidies, a state pre-K contract, or a Head Start grant.
The funding source shows up in the wage.
If you are choosing where to work, the short version: in the data above, school-based classrooms pay the same occupation more than child care services, directors out-earn classroom staff, and states are adding supplements, floors and credits — check what your state currently runs before you assume the median is all there is.
The childcare teacher jobs board shows the roles centers are hiring for right now.
This page is career information, not licensing or legal advice. Pay programs, grant conditions and wage rules change — confirm current details with the state child care licensing agency, the Office of Head Start (ACF), or the state agency that administers the program named.