What does your center need from a childcare director?
A childcare director runs the business of your center so your teachers can run their classrooms. The role bundles three jobs: leading and scheduling staff, owning operations — enrollment, records, families, billing — and carrying your licensing relationship day to day.
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 family tours — and the duties the director owns outright. That list becomes your job description, your screening rubric and, later, the working agreement that keeps the hire.
Scope the role to your program. A single-site director who covers a classroom a few hours a day is a different job from a director fully out of ratio, and both are different from a leader hired to run one location of several. If what you need is a second-in-command rather than a top job, hire for an assistant director and say so — a mislabeled role is a fast way to lose the person you recruited.
Our career-side guide explains what a childcare director does across center sizes. Use it to draw the line between director duties, assistant-director duties and lead-teacher duties before you write the posting.
Looking to hire? Post your childcare director role on ChildcareHires and reach people who already work in early education.
Post a Childcare Director Job →What qualifications must a childcare director meet before working in ratio?
Start from your state's rule, not from a template. The state child care licensing agency sets who may direct a center, and the education, experience and credential it takes are set in your state's rule and can depend on your center's licensed capacity and the ages it serves. Ask your licensing consultant to confirm — in writing, before you post the job — which director qualification your license requires, so you don't screen candidates against the wrong bar.
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 emergency preparedness, building safety and child abuse recognition and reporting.
Then there is ratio. If your director will cover classrooms, whatever your state requires staff to meet before counting in ratio applies to them like any teacher. Confirm what counting in ratio requires for your license rather than assuming the director credential covers it.
Before the offer: collect transcripts and certificates, verify the credential with the issuing body, and check references with a previous owner, board member or supervisor who saw them across a licensing cycle. Build the training deadline into your onboarding plan — the CCDF pre-service training is a three-month clock, not a sometime goal.
Rules differ by state and change. Confirm the director 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 director?
Benchmark first, then decide what you can defend. BLS's OEWS survey for May 2025 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 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. These are all-industry figures across every setting that employs administrators, not a recommendation for your market.
Read the percentiles as a distribution, not a menu. A 10th-percentile figure is not an entry-level director salary, and a 90th-percentile figure is not an overpayment — it is what the top of the market pays. For state and metro-level numbers, see our childcare director salary data.
Two market forces push against the middle of that range. First, your director will set and defend your teachers' pay, and the gap they inherit is real: preschool teachers in elementary and secondary schools earn a $27.29-an-hour median in the same May 2025 release, against $17.72 in private child care services. Second, an offer visibly below the benchmarks you already have invites a counteroffer you could have prevented.
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 a particular director's duties actually fit an exemption is a wage-and-hour question — confirm with the Department of Labor or your employment counsel.
Where do you find childcare directors?
Directors come from two pools. The first is inside your building: BLS counted 518,910 childcare workers and 478,780 preschool teachers nationwide as of May 2025, and the strongest internal candidates — your assistant director or a long-tenured lead teacher — already know your families, your rooms and your licensing history. The second pool is sitting directors: BLS counted 60,540 preschool and daycare administrators in private child care services as of May 2025, and recruiting one means offering a genuine step up from the job they already hold.
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; the job boards directors actually read; early childhood education program career services at nearby colleges; owner and director peer groups; and a plain request for referrals in your center's community. See what candidates see first — our childcare director jobs page shows the live market.
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+). 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 for 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 a director posting either.
How do you screen and interview childcare directors?
Screen in stages, and make the expensive checks late. Paper-screen against the duties you wrote down first; verify the credential and transcripts with the issuing body; run a structured interview; check references with a previous owner, board member or licensing-era supervisor; 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, family plans or religion.
Predict the job with scenarios, not self-descriptions. Ask how they would cover an infant room when two teachers call out, what they do in the first week of an enrollment dip, how they prepare for a licensing visit, and how they coach a teacher whose classroom is struggling. Strong answers talk about supervision, staffing schedules built around ratio rules, documentation habits, and families treated as the center's customers — not about intuition.
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. Keep candidate visits to observation plus a structured interview until your background-check results are back.
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 direct somewhere else today; and any state paperwork your licensing consultant flags for a new director. This guide doesn't publish an average time-to-fill for 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. Under 45 CFR 98.43(d)(4), a new hire may begin work only after a qualifying result on either the FBI 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 — some states are stricter, so confirm with your licensing agency. That alone can move your start date. And if your program serves subsidized families, CCDF requires the pre-service health-and-safety training to be completed within three months, so put the orientation training in the hire's first weeks, not the back half of the window.
How do you keep them after the hire?
The hire only pays off if it holds. Published estimates of how fast early educators leave range widely by method and state — they come from individual studies and surveys, not one national statistic, and we have not confirmed any of them against the primary studies: a Virginia study put annual departures of center teachers at 36% to 38%, research on Louisiana centers found rates as high as 46%, and director-reported national surveys land lower still, at 20% to 25%. What the range does tell you is that good people leaving centers is a live risk in this field — and the director you hire will judge you on what you do about it.
The strongest 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 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.
Then run the job so the authority matches the accountability. Fund the professional development your state requires of directors as growth, not a checkbox — and remember that required training, the director's or their staff's, is generally paid work time under the FLSA, not an unpaid expectation. Give the director the pay decisions, the schedule and the family relationships you hired them to own, and review their compensation against the market once a year. And when you're ready to build the roster around them, our guide to hiring for your childcare center covers the teachers, assistants, floaters and support roles underneath this one.
This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Confirm qualification, training, ratio, background-check and posting rules with your state child care licensing agency (or your state labor department for pay transparency), and wage-and-hour questions with the Department of Labor or your employment counsel.