What does your center need from an assistant director?
An assistant director is your center's second-in-command: half office, half classrooms. On the office side they carry the operations you delegate — the weekly schedule, enrollment paperwork, family conversations, the records your license runs on. On the classroom side they cover rooms when the schedule runs short, model practice for your teachers, and make the calls while you are off-site.
Before you post anything, write down the split. Which duties move from you or your director to this role outright, which are shared, and which stay where they are. An owner-operator may need a coverage-and-operations partner; a multi-room center with a full-time director may want a director-in-training who can step into the top job. Both fit the same job title and they are very different jobs in practice — say in the posting which one you mean.
Decide the authority that comes with the duties: does this hire set the schedule, sit in on hiring, handle a family complaint end to end, sign off on day-to-day spending? That list becomes your job description, your screening rubric and, later, the working agreement that decides whether the hire stays.
Our career-side guide explains what an assistant director does day to day, where the role fits and how the career path runs. Use it to draw the line between director duties, assistant-director duties and lead-teacher duties before you write a single line of the posting.
Looking to hire? Post your assistant director role on ChildcareHires and reach people who already work in early education.
Post an Assistant Director Job →What qualifications must an assistant director meet before working in ratio?
Start from your state's rule, not from a template. The state child care licensing agency sets staff qualifications, and what it takes to hold a leadership role or to work in a classroom is written in your state's rule. Ask your licensing consultant two questions in writing before you post: what qualification your state's rule sets for the assistant director role on your license, and what staff must meet to count in ratio for the age groups this hire will cover. A leadership title does not automatically change either answer — confirm both rather than assuming the title covers it.
There is a federal training floor underneath. Under the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) rules administered by the Administration for Children and Families, states must require 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. The CCDF topic list runs from safe sleep and pediatric first aid and CPR to medication administration, emergency preparedness, building safety and child abuse recognition and reporting.
Then verify what the candidate brings. Collect transcripts and certificates, verify each credential with the issuing body, and check references with a supervisor who saw the candidate run a room, a schedule or a staff meeting — not only teach alongside one. Put the training deadline in the onboarding plan: for a program serving subsidized families, the CCDF pre-service window is a three-month clock, so orientation belongs in the hire's first weeks.
Run your background-check steps before the first day — that guide walks the steps, the timetable and the costs. Rules differ by state and change. Confirm the qualification, training and ratio rules that apply to this hire with your state child care licensing agency before you post or offer.
How much should you pay an assistant director?
Benchmark from the category that anchors director pay: education and childcare administrators, preschool and daycare (SOC 11-9031). BLS's OEWS survey for May 2025 puts that category at a U.S. median of $59,300 a year ($28.51 an hour), with the 10th percentile at $38,580 and the 90th at $98,240; the band at the top of this page — $47,040 to $75,500 — is the same release's 25th to 75th percentile. The category spans directors and administrators across every setting that employs them, so treat it as a benchmark for your center's leadership tier, not an offer price for the title. Our assistant director salary page explains what that benchmark covers, and the childcare director salary page carries the state-by-state table for the same category.
Position the offer against your own classroom scale. Look first at what your lead teachers and floaters earn when you set the range, because the candidates you want are the ones already doing the work one step down. For context from the same May 2025 release: within private child care services, childcare workers earn a $16.43-an-hour median and preschool teachers $17.72 (BLS OEWS industry medians, NAICS 6244). An assistant director offer at or barely above your lead-teacher scale buys the title without the commitment — and the commitment is the point of the hire.
If you pay a salary and classify the role exempt under the FLSA's white-collar rules, the current salary threshold is $684 a week ($35,568 a year) — payable as $1,368 biweekly, $1,482 semimonthly or $2,964 monthly. That threshold is a floor for the classification, not a market rate. Whether an assistant director's duties actually fit an exemption is a wage-and-hour question, and it is not automatic for childcare programs: the FLSA's "educational establishment" test for nursery-school settings depends on state law, which is why many daycare teachers are not overtime-exempt. Confirm the classification with the Department of Labor or your employment counsel before you advertise a salary.
Where do you find assistant directors?
Two pools, and the first one is your own building. The field your candidates come from is large — BLS counted 518,910 childcare workers and 478,780 preschool teachers nationwide as of May 2025 — and the internal candidates who already know your rooms, your families and your licensing history shorten every step after the posting. The external pool is experienced leadership: BLS counted 60,540 preschool and daycare administrators in private child care services as of May 2025, and recruiting one of them means offering a genuine step up from the job they already hold.
Work the channels in order of fit: a promotion posted openly to your own staff; your state's early childhood job board or professional-development registry careers page, if it runs one; the job boards assistant directors actually read; early childhood education career services at nearby colleges; and referrals from your center's community. See what candidates see — our assistant director jobs page shows the live market — and our guide to where to post the job breaks down the channels for childcare roles.
If you boost postings on Facebook or Instagram, Meta requires employment ads to run under its Special Ad Category: for US advertisers, age, gender and ZIP-code targeting, lookalikes and saved audiences are limited or unavailable. Build the ad to sell the role, not to filter the audience.
Write the posting to the rules, too. In eight states verified from primary sources, a posting must carry the pay range: California (15+ employees), Colorado (all employers, benefits included), New York (4+), Washington (15+), Illinois (15+), Minnesota (30+), Massachusetts (25+, since October 29, 2025) and Vermont (5+). Other states may have rules our research did not verify, and thresholds change — confirm your state labor department's current requirement before you post. And write to the EEOC's line: an ad that shows a preference based on a protected trait is illegal — the EEOC's examples include ads seeking "females" or "recent college graduates" — so "young and energetic" has no place in the ad either.
How do you screen and interview assistant directors?
Screen in stages, and make the expensive checks late. Paper-screen against the duties list you wrote first; verify credentials with the issuing body; run a structured interview; check references with someone who saw the candidate supervise — a director they supported, not only a teacher they worked beside. Then the state background check, on your licensing agency's process and timetable. Confirm the background-check steps and timetable with your state child care licensing agency before you set a start date.
Keep the interview lawful. EEOC-enforced laws bar discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and transgender status), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Disability-related questions are prohibited before a job offer, and the EEOC advises limiting pre-employment questions to what is essential to judge qualifications — no questions built to surface age, national origin or religion.
Predict the job with scenarios a second-in-command actually faces. Ask how they would rebuild tomorrow's schedule when two teachers call out; what they would fix first in an enrollment dip; how they coach a teacher whose room is struggling; how they close out a family complaint the director never hears about; and what they check in the hour before a licensing visit. Strong answers talk about supervision, staffing schedules built around ratio rules, documentation habits, discretion, and families treated as the center's customers — not about instinct.
One trap to plan around: the working interview. Productive time during a candidate's classroom shift can be hours worked under the FLSA — our research found no DOL guidance written for working interviews, so pay for any candidate time you use. Until your background-check results are back, keep candidate visits to observation plus a structured interview.
How long does the hire take, from post to first day?
Plan backwards from the day you need the office covered, and know which pieces you control. Yours: how long the posting runs, how fast you schedule interviews, how quickly references are called. Not yours: your state's background-check turnaround, which the licensing agency sets; the candidate's notice period if they hold a leadership job somewhere else today; and any paperwork on your license for a leadership hire — ask your licensing consultant whether your state requires notification before the new hire starts.
This guide doesn't publish an average time-to-fill for assistant director searches, because no source behind it supports one — measure your own last search instead.
Two clocks are set for you. Start the state background check the day you make the offer, so the agency's timetable runs while you finish references and notice periods. And if your program serves subsidized families, CCDF requires the pre-service health-and-safety training to be completed within three months — put orientation training in the hire's first weeks, not the back half of the window. An internal candidate moves faster through some steps, but confirm with your licensing agency which checks have to rerun before a promotion starts.
How do you keep them after the hire?
The hire only pays off if it holds — and a good assistant director is, from the day they start, a director candidate for someone else's center. Give the retention question the same planning you gave the search.
The clearest causal evidence our research found on keeping early educators is compensation tied to staying. In a University of Virginia experiment reported by the U.S. Treasury in 2021, offering child care teachers $1,500 to stay cut departures nearly in half, to 13%, versus nearly a quarter of non-recipients leaving within eight months. It was tested on teachers, not assistant directors — but the mechanism, real money conditioned on staying, is one you can apply to the hire you cannot afford to lose. Set the amount from your own budget; nothing in the research behind this page fixes a figure.
Our research found no single national turnover figure to benchmark against, either: published estimates range from under 10 percent to 46 percent depending on method and state. The honest comparison is your own center's last twelve months — and the assistant director you just hired touches the levers that move it: the schedule, the coaching, the coverage, the tone of the staff room.
Then run the job so the authority matches the accountability. Hand over the schedule decisions, the hiring input and the family conversations you hired them to own. Treat required training as paid work time — under the FLSA it generally is — and fund their training toward director qualification as growth, not a checkbox. If the director's chair is the next step for them, say what it takes, what your timeline is, and when you will revisit the conversation. Review their compensation against the benchmark once a year. And when you are ready to build the roster underneath them, our guide to hiring for your childcare center covers the teachers, assistants, floaters and support roles this role leads.
This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Confirm qualification, training, ratio and background-check rules with your state child care licensing agency, posting and pay-transparency rules with your state labor department, and wage-and-hour questions with the Department of Labor or your employment counsel.