What does your center need from a childcare administrator?
A childcare administrator runs the office of your center so your director and teachers can run the program. The role bundles front-desk work — the first voice a family hears, tour scheduling, daily sign-in traffic — with the back office: enrollment paperwork, child records, billing support, staff files and the supply and purchasing trail.
Before you post anything, decide which parts of that bundle you are hiring for. Write down the duties you will keep — an owner who stays on-site may keep finances or vendor contracts — and the duties the administrator owns outright. That list becomes your job description, your screening rubric and, later, the working agreement that keeps the hire.
Make one decision first, because everything downstream follows it: is this person also the director of record on your license, or are they office and enrollment staff supporting a director who holds that role? The qualifications you screen for and the pay band you benchmark against depend on the answer. If what you actually need is the licensed leader of the center, hire for that job instead — our childcare director hiring guide covers it.
Our career-side guide explains what a childcare administrator does day to day. Use it to draw the line between administrator duties, director duties and front-desk coverage before you write the posting.
Looking to hire? Post your childcare administrator role on ChildcareHires and reach people who already work in early education.
Post a Childcare Administrator Job →What qualifications must a childcare administrator meet before working in ratio?
Start from your state's rule, not from a template. The state child care licensing agency sets the qualifications your center's staff must meet, and what applies to an administrator on your license depends on your state's rule and on the duties you assign the role. Ask your licensing consultant to confirm — in writing, before you post the job — which requirements apply to this position, so you don't screen candidates against the wrong bar.
The two hats matter here. If the administrator will be the director of record on your license, the qualifications your state sets for directors are the ones to screen against. If the role is office and enrollment support out of ratio, don't assume the office title sits outside the rules — ask your licensing consultant which staff on your license must meet training, background-check and qualification requirements, and put the answer in the job file.
Then there is ratio. If you expect this person to cover classrooms when the schedule runs thin, whatever your state requires before staff count in ratio applies to them like any teacher. Confirm what counting in ratio requires for your license before you build the schedule around coverage.
Before the offer: collect transcripts and certificates, verify each credential with the body that issued it, and check references with a supervisor who saw the person work through at least one licensing cycle, not just a coworker.
Rules differ by state and change. Confirm the qualification, training and ratio rules that apply to your center's license with your state child care licensing agency before you post or offer.
How much should you pay a childcare administrator?
Benchmark first, then decide what you can defend. For office and enrollment staff, BLS's nearest published lines are its office occupations. In the OEWS survey for May 2025, secretaries and administrative assistants (SOC 43-6014) earned a median of $41,650 a year in Child Care Services and $47,540 a year across all industries; receptionists and information clerks (SOC 43-4171) earned $34,270 a year in Child Care Services and $38,010 a year across all industries. These are proxies for the desk you are filling, not figures for the title and not a recommendation for your market. Our childcare administrator salary page lines up how the nearby numbers compare.
If the hire will also be the director of record on your license, benchmark against the director-level line instead. The same release puts education and childcare administrators, preschool and daycare (SOC 11-9031) at a U.S. median of $59,300 a year ($28.51 an hour), with the 10th percentile at $38,580 and the 90th percentile at $98,240 across all industries. Don't use that line for an office hire — it covers center directors. Our childcare director salary page carries that occupation's data by state.
Set the offer with your inside scale in view, because this role touches it. In private child care services, the same release puts medians at $16.43 an hour for childcare workers and $17.72 an hour for preschool teachers — the classroom pay scale your administrator may end up helping you administer and defend. And the competition is real: preschool teachers in elementary and secondary schools earned a median of $27.29 an hour ($56,750 a year) in the same release, which is the pull public pre-K settings put on preschool teachers.
Those are benchmarks for hiring, not wage-and-hour conclusions. How overtime rules treat a salaried administrator is a classification question — confirm it with the Department of Labor or your employment counsel before you post the range.
Where do you find childcare administrative staff?
Work three pools. The first is inside your building: BLS OEWS counted 518,910 childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) and 478,780 preschool teachers except special education (25-2011) nationwide as of May 2025, counts that span schools, centers and homes — and your strongest internal candidates already know your families, your rooms and your records. The second is people already running the office at another center or program, and recruiting one means offering a genuine step up from the job they already hold. The third is office talent outside early education: the core of this job is office work, and the early-education-specific pieces — records, subsidy paperwork, licensing visits — are the parts you train on your systems.
Then work the channels in order of fit: your state's early childhood job board or professional-development registry careers page, if it runs one; early childhood education program career services at nearby colleges; the job boards where childcare administration jobs get seen; and a plain request for referrals in your center's community. Our guide ranks where to post the job channel by channel.
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, exclusion 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), New York (4+), Washington (15+), Illinois (15+), Minnesota (30+), Massachusetts (25+ employees, since October 29, 2025) and Vermont (5+). Thresholds and rules change — confirm your state labor department's current requirement before you post.
And write it to the EEOC's line: an ad that shows a preference based on a protected trait is illegal — the EEOC's own examples are ads seeking "females" or "recent college graduates." "Young and energetic" has no place in an administrator posting either.
How do you screen and interview childcare administrative staff?
Screen in stages, and make the expensive checks late. Paper-screen against the duties you wrote down first; run a structured interview; give a short skills exercise — a records scenario, a scheduling conflict, a drafting task — and keep it a simulation, not productive work; check references with people who supervised the candidate's actual desk; then the background check, on your licensing agency's process. Our step-by-step guide to the background-check steps lays out the sequence, and your licensing consultant confirms the timetable for your license.
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, and bar retaliation. Disability-related questions are prohibited before a job offer, and the EEOC advises limiting pre-employment questions to what is essential to judge qualifications, and its guidance says to avoid questions that would reveal race, sex, national origin, disability, age, religion, color or ancestry.
Predict the job with scenarios, not self-descriptions. Ask how they would run a front desk when two tours, a billing question and a licensing paperwork deadline land at once; what they do in the first week of an enrollment dip; how they handle a family angry about a charge; and how they organize child records so a staff member can find one in seconds. Strong answers talk about documentation habits, confidentiality, calm triage and follow-through — and treat families as the center's customers — not about being "good with people."
How long does the hire take, from post to first day?
Plan backwards from the day you need the desk covered, and know which pieces you control. Yours: how long the posting runs, how fast you schedule interviews, how quickly references get called. Not yours: your state's background-check turnaround, which the licensing agency sets, and the candidate's notice period if they hold a similar desk somewhere today. This guide doesn't publish an average time-to-fill for administrator searches, because no source behind it supports one — measure your own last search instead.
Two habits protect the start date. Start the background check the day you make the offer, not the week before the first day — it is the piece most likely to move your timeline. And put orientation on your systems in the first weeks: enrollment software, records, billing and the family-communication routines. Ask your licensing consultant which training deadlines apply to a new hire on your license, and build them into the first month rather than the back half of it.
How do you keep them after the hire?
The hire only pays off if it holds, and the best causal evidence 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 administrators — but the mechanism, real money conditioned on staying, is one you can apply to the person who runs your office. Set the amount from your own budget; nothing in the research behind this page fixes a figure.
Then run the job so the authority matches the accountability. Give the administrator the enrollment systems, the family-facing communication and the records they were hired to own, instead of letting the desk become everyone's overflow. Review their pay against the market once a year — the benchmarks above give you the conversation — and map the growth path you can offer, toward assistant director or director where your state's rules and your org chart allow.
And when you're ready to build the team around them, our guide to hiring for your childcare center covers the teachers, assistants, floaters and support roles that sit alongside this one.
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, pay-transparency posting rules with your state labor department, and wage-and-hour questions with the Department of Labor or your employment counsel.