Pre-K Teacher Statistics 2026: Job Market, Pay, Demand & Workforce

Childcare Hires had 409 open pre-K teacher listings from 176 employers on October 13, 2026.

288 were first posted in the previous 14 days and 336 in the previous 30 days.

At least 7.3% of pre-K teacher listings were part-time on October 13, 2026.

Listings that name no schedule are counted as full-time, so the real part-time share is likely higher.

To browse the openings themselves, see all pre-K teacher listings.

Employers hiring pre-K teachers on Childcare Hires advertise a median of $18.50 an hour across 95 employers on October 13, 2026; this is advertised pay, not earnings.

BLS publishes no separate wage for pre-K teachers; the median annual wage for all preschool teachers, except special education (SOC 25-2011), the occupation that includes them, was $38,140 in May 2025 (BLS OEWS).

For more on what pre-K teachers earn, see the pre-K teacher salary guide.

New York had the most open pre-K teacher listings on October 13, 2026, with 50 (12.2% of the national total).

Florida followed with 48 (11.7%).

176 employers had open pre-K teacher listings on Childcare Hires on October 13, 2026, and the five largest posted 40.6% of them.

151 employers (85.8%) had exactly one open pre-K teacher listing.

Child care services employed 347,720 preschool teachers in May 2025, the industry's largest occupation at 34.6% of its wage-and-salary jobs, with a median annual wage of $36,850 (BLS OEWS, NAICS 6244).

The child care services industry employed 1,004,990 wage-and-salary workers in May 2025, with a median annual wage of $36,580 across all its occupations (BLS OEWS, NAICS 6244).

For BLS employment projections and annual openings, see the childcare and preschool teacher job outlook.

For why centers struggle to fill these roles, see our childcare staffing shortage analysis.

For how to enter the field, see the pre-K teacher career guide.

Listing figures are computed from every active, paid pre-K teacher listing on Childcare Hires at the time shown, and refreshed every six hours.

Listings on a job board are not a random sample of all pre-K teacher jobs, so read them as a picture of current hiring, not of total employment.

Advertised pay is the midpoint of the range an employer posts, or its single figure, and hourly and annual postings are never converted into each other.

The headline is the employer median: each employer’s own median, then the median across employers, so a chain posting hundreds of openings counts once.

A pay figure needs at least 30 listings from 10 employers and is withheld when one employer posted more than 50% of them.

Federal figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and are quoted as published, with the year in each sentence.

Pre-K listings on a job board come mostly from private centers and franchise schools; public school district pre-K jobs are under-represented, so read the pay figures as center pay.