Hiring for a childcare center is a loop, not a single decision: you pick the classroom role your enrollment and ratios demand, you recruit and screen against your state's qualification rules, you pay at or above your local market, and you onboard and keep the teachers you trained. This guide walks the whole loop for center owners, directors and franchise operators — with the federal floors and the pay data named.
Which role does your center need to hire next?
Your next hire is a staffing decision before it is a recruiting one.
Start from your enrollment by age band, apply your license's ratios and group sizes to each room, and map the schedule from opening to closing — the role that falls out (an infant lead, a toddler assistant, a floater, a second director) is the role to hire.
The roles centers hire fall into a few families:
- Lead teachers by age band — infant, toddler, preschool and pre-K — who carry your state's qualification requirements for the title.
- Assistants, aides and floaters who multiply classroom capacity and cover breaks, transitions and nap-time overlap.
- Directors and assistant directors who run enrollment, staffing, family communication and the compliance calendar.
- Support staff — cooks, drivers and front-desk administrators — who keep the classrooms staffed and the full day running.
The occupation pool is measurable.
In BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey for May 2025, private child care services (NAICS 6244) employed 347,720 preschool teachers, 269,970 childcare workers, 140,750 teaching assistants and 60,540 preschool and daycare administrators.
The same May 2025 survey, counted across all industries, finds 478,780 preschool teachers (SOC 25-2011) and 518,910 childcare workers (SOC 39-9011).
Preschool teachers also work in schools and other settings — that wider pool is part of who you are competing with when a good teacher weighs your offer against a school's.
Write the posting around the level (lead versus assistant), the age band and the schedule, not a wish list.
It also pays to see the market from the other side: browse childcare teacher jobs to see what candidates see before you set the requirements.
How does the childcare hiring process work, step by step?
The steps are the same whether you are hiring your first assistant or a director — what changes is how much your state's rules shape each one.
- Define the role against your state's rules. Your state child care licensing agency sets qualification minimums by role, so phrase the requirement as "meets [your state]'s licensing requirements for [title]" and let candidates self-screen.
- Post with the pay range, the schedule and the age band up front, so candidates can see the fit without asking.
- Screen applications and check references. Verify the credentials the role requires rather than taking the résumé's word for them.
- Interview — including a working interview. A paid classroom trial shows you supervision and guidance habits no interview answer will — but a paid trial is work with children, so at a CCDF-covered program it waits for the fingerprint result in the next step and runs under supervision. Keep every question job-related: EEOC-enforced laws bar employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and transgender status), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information, and they bar retaliation.
- Run background checks before anyone works with children. Under the federal CCDF rules at 45 CFR 98.43(d)(4), which apply to CCDF-covered providers — licensed, regulated or registered, and subsidy-receiving — a new hire may begin work after a qualifying result on either the FBI fingerprint check or the in-state fingerprint check, and until every component clears they must be supervised at all times by someone with a qualifying background check. Your state's rules may be stricter; some bar any work before full clearance.
- Build orientation into the start date. CCDF requires states to set pre-service or orientation health-and-safety training that must be completed within three months, plus ongoing annual professional development, for caregivers, teachers and directors in subsidy-receiving programs. Your state's hour counts and deadlines are its own.
Confirm before you hire: background-check components have a federal CCDF floor like the one above and your state's rules may add to it, while training hours and first-solo-day rules are set and enforced by your state child care licensing agency — not by this page.
Confirm the current rules before you schedule anyone alone with children.
How many staff do ratios require for each classroom?
Start with where the rule comes from: federal CCDF rules do not set numeric ratios — each state must describe group size limits and child-to-caregiver ratios by age in its CCDF Plan (45 CFR 98.41(d)) — and your state child care licensing agency sets the ratios and group sizes your license actually carries.
A widely used best-practice reference point is Caring for Our Children (CFOC standard 1.1.1.2) — a health-and-safety standard, not law — which recommends 3:1 with a maximum group of 6 for infants 12 months and younger, 4:1 (a group of 8) for 13-35 months, 7:1 (a group of 14) for 3-year-olds and 8:1 (a group of 16) for 4- and 5-year-olds.
For staffing, the practical reading is: your license's ratios for the ages you serve, your licensed group sizes and who counts in ratio decide how many staff each classroom needs — and how deep a substitute bench you need so one absence does not leave a room out of ratio.
Confirm before you schedule: ratios, group sizes and nap-time staffing rules are set state by state, and states change them.
Confirm the current numbers for every age band you serve with your state child care licensing agency before you commit to a schedule.
What should you pay childcare teachers to stay competitive?
Benchmark before you budget.
In BLS OEWS data for May 2025, preschool teachers except special education (SOC 25-2011) earn a U.S. median of $18.34 per hour ($38,140 per year), and childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) earn a median of $16.82 per hour ($34,980 per year).
Inside your own industry the medians run lower: in private child care services (NAICS 6244), the May 2025 medians are $17.72 per hour for preschool teachers and $16.43 per hour for childcare workers — below the all-industry medians for both occupations.
That industry gap is your competitive problem.
In the same May 2025 survey, preschool teachers in elementary and secondary schools earned a median of $27.29 per hour ($56,750 per year), versus $17.72 per hour ($36,850 per year) in child care services — the same occupation paid very differently by setting.
A different, older source runs on its own method: the Berkeley CSCCE Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024, built on 2022 ACS data, reported a national median early educator wage of $13.07 per hour.
That series predates the May 2025 federal survey above and does not count the same occupations, so treat OEWS as the current benchmark and do not compare the two figures directly.
Two practical notes for benchmarking.
First, national medians are not your market — the childcare teacher salary and preschool teacher salary pages carry the state-by-state tables from the same survey, so price against your state and metro rather than the country.
Second, BLS has no occupation of its own for some titles you may be hiring — Head Start teachers, Montessori teachers, floaters, substitutes and coaches among them.
Benchmark those roles against the nearest SOC (39-9011, 25-2011 or 11-9031) or against local job postings, never against a BLS figure labeled with the title itself.
Where do you post childcare jobs and find candidates?
Post where early educators already look, and make the posting itself easy to say yes to.
The channels that work for centers:
- Niche boards. A board that lists only early-education jobs puts your opening in front of teachers, assistants, floaters and directors who are actively looking for this work — you can post your childcare job on ChildcareHires.
- Your state's early childhood system. Ask your state's early childhood professional development system or workforce registry whether it runs a job board, and if your area has a child care resource and referral agency, ask which channels centers near you use.
- Colleges and credential programs. Early childhood education departments and CDA training programs at local colleges are a natural place to reach new assistants and career changers — ask the career office to circulate your posting.
- Your own roster. Staff referrals and former employees who left on good terms are sources you already trust — ask your current teachers who else should be on your list.
Whatever the channel, the posting shapes the applicant pool: state the pay range, the schedule and the age band in the first lines, describe physical demands as the job's own rather than as requirements imposed on you, and phrase qualifications as "meets [your state]'s licensing requirements for [title]".
Then move quickly — start the background checks early, run the working interview as soon as a qualifying fingerprint result is back (or full clearance, where your state requires it), and make the offer as soon as the checks allow.
How do you onboard and keep new staff?
Onboarding and retention are one system: the first three months do much to decide whether the teacher you recruited becomes the teacher who stays.
Start with the training clock.
Under CCDF, states must set pre-service or orientation health-and-safety training — completed within three months — plus ongoing annual professional development for caregivers, teachers and directors in subsidy-receiving programs, and your state's licensing rules add their own hour counts and topics.
Build the schedule so training time is paid time, not something a new teacher owes you after shift.
Pair every new hire with an experienced teacher, hand over responsibility in steps as the checks and training clear, and hold a short check-in every week for the first month — early check-ins catch fixable problems before they become resignations.
The retention problem is real, and it is measurable — honestly.
There is no single national turnover rate for childcare teachers; published estimates range from under 10 percent in school-sponsored centers to 46 percent depending on method and state.
The range tracks the setting.
A Minneapolis Fed analysis of the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education found center teacher turnover of 21.1 percent in "all other" centers versus 7.7 percent in school-sponsored centers, and 25.3 percent in centers serving subsidized children versus 15.8 percent in those that do not.
Studies in individual states put it higher in some places: one study of Louisiana centers put annual teacher turnover as high as 46 percent, and a Virginia study put it at 36 to 38 percent.
What moves it?
The cleanest causal evidence is money at the decision point: Treasury reported in 2021 that in a University of Virginia experiment offering child care teachers $1,500 to stay, departures were cut nearly in half, to 13 percent, versus nearly a quarter of non-recipients leaving within eight months.
You control several versions of that lever — predictable schedules, paid training time and funded credentials.
The T.E.A.C.H.
Early Childhood scholarship model is built for employers: it pays most of tuition, books and travel, often requires paid release time from the sponsoring employer, awards a bonus or raise on completing credit hours, and requires the recipient to stay with the sponsoring program for a set period.
The T.E.A.C.H.
National Center's directory listed programs in 21 states as of October 2026 — check whether your state participates.
Run stay interviews with the teachers you want to keep and exit interviews with the ones you lose; the paired pattern tells you which lever your center is missing.
Opening a center: what to plan before the first hire
If you are staffing a center that does not exist yet, hiring is the fourth decision, not the first: license, floor plan, staffing model, then hires.
Whether your program needs a license, and the application, inspection and director-qualification steps that lead to one, are set state by state — confirm the sequence with your state child care licensing agency before you make your first hire.
Run the staffing math before you sign a lease: planned enrollment by age band, times your state's ratios and group sizes, equals the number of staff you must field at opening — at the qualification levels your state sets for each title, at the pay your local market demands, with background checks and orientation training built into every start date.
Size the sector honestly.
BLS's Current Employment Statistics counted about 1,088,600 jobs in child care services (NAICS 6244, seasonally adjusted) in August 2026, a preliminary figure, and the industry is above its pre-pandemic level: 1,048,600 jobs in February 2020, a fall to 676,600 in April 2020, and 1,090,200 by July 2026.
That is more child care services jobs than before the pandemic.
Budget the recurring lines — payroll, background checks, paid training time and substitute coverage — from current numbers: licensing fees and processes change, so pull the current schedule from your state child care licensing agency rather than from a blog post.
This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Staffing ratios, qualification rules and background-check requirements are set and enforced by your state child care licensing agency — confirm the current rules there before you hire, schedule or open.