The childcare staffing shortage: why centers cannot hire and what works

Start with the count most headlines get wrong. BLS Current Employment Statistics count about 1,088,600 jobs in the child care services industry (NAICS 6244, seasonally adjusted) in August 2026 — a preliminary figure.

That is above the pre-pandemic level: the industry employed 1,048,600 people in February 2020, collapsed to 676,600 in April 2020, and has rebuilt since (1,090,200 in July 2026).

Employment peaked at 1,102,100 in January 2026 and has eased slightly since.

So the industry as a whole is not smaller than it was in 2020 — and the hiring problem persists anyway.

The shortage lives in churn, and there is no single national turnover figure: published estimates range from under 10 percent, in school-sponsored centers, to as high as 46 percent a year depending on the study, the state and the method.

A 2022 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 against 7.7 percent in school-sponsored centers, and 25.3 percent in centers serving subsidized children against 15.8 percent in centers that do not.

State studies run higher still: a March 2026 academic working paper on early-childhood teacher turnover reports Louisiana research finding annual teacher turnover as high as 46 percent, and a Virginia study putting annual center teacher turnover at 36 to 38 percent.

For scale, here is who the workforce actually is.

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 — occupation counts that span schools, centers and homes.

Inside private child care services itself, the same OEWS release counts 347,720 preschool teachers, 269,970 childcare workers, 140,750 teaching assistants and 60,540 preschool and daycare administrators.

Read the churn numbers as an operator, not a judge.

The same job title carries very different odds depending on the setting a program runs and the families it serves, so there is no national "shortage rate" to benchmark against — only your own roster history.

What is universal is the mechanism: every point of churn is a room that must be re-staffed while it keeps running.

Start with pay, because every other shortage story runs through it. BLS OEWS May 2025 puts the U.S. median at $16.82 an hour ($34,980 a year) for childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) and $18.34 an hour ($38,140 a year) for preschool teachers except special education (25-2011).

Inside the private child care services industry the medians run $16.43 and $17.72 an hour respectively — below the all-industry medians for both occupations.

The Berkeley CSCCE Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024 reports a national median early educator wage of $13.07 an hour; that index is built on 2022 ACS data, so treat the newer BLS figures as the better benchmark and expect the two to disagree.

The employer on the other side of the table may not be another center.

Preschool teachers working in elementary and secondary schools — the public pre-K settings — had a May 2025 median of $27.29 an hour ($56,750 a year), far above the $17.72 an hour child care industry median for the same occupation.

Same occupation, different payroll — and that public-school median is one benchmark competing for your teachers when they compare offers.

Why not simply pay more?

Margins: a September 2021 U.S. Treasury report said most for-profit child care facilities operate on razor-thin profit margins usually below 1 percent.

That figure is Treasury's 2021 characterization, drawn from a secondary source — read it as the structure of for-profit care rather than a current measured rate — but for a for-profit center it describes the box it hires inside, where a wage move that closes a school-sector gap can consume the whole margin.

The last reason the shortage persists is arithmetic.

BLS projects childcare worker employment to decline 2 percent from 2025 to 2035 — yet projects about 150,300 openings a year, all of them replacement needs.

Preschool teacher employment — the occupation that spans both center- and school-based programs — is projected to grow 4 percent over the same decade, with about 66,700 openings a year.

For childcare workers, the industry is not hiring into growth; it is re-filling the same classrooms over and over.

For a center, the shortage is not a statistic — it decides whether a room opens on Monday morning.

Federal CCDF rules do not set numeric ratios: each state must describe its group size limits and child-to-caregiver ratios by age in its CCDF Plan.

For a licensed center, your state's child care licensing agency sets the ratios and group sizes your rooms operate under — so when a teacher resigns, a fully enrolled room cannot simply run one caregiver short: the ratio caps how many children the room may serve, and the enrollment cap lands on the families already on your waitlist.

No current national count of rooms closed for lack of staff held up in our research, so size the problem by your own schedule rather than a statistic.

What is safe to describe is the cascade one resignation sets off in a fully enrolled room: the room's headcount follows its staffing, the families who cannot be seated go elsewhere, and the revenue the room was budgeted to bring in does not arrive.

For a for-profit center on the margins a 2021 Treasury report described for most for-profit facilities (usually below 1 percent), an unfunded payroll slot is not an inconvenience — it is the payroll slot that was going to fund the next wage offer.

The operational response is coverage planning, and it starts with the arithmetic of your own license: how many staff a daycare needs works through the room-by-room count, and daycare staff scheduling covers building the weekly plan that absorbs a callout without closing a room.

Confirm the coverage requirements your rooms actually operate under with your state child care licensing agency — the numbers that decide whether a classroom opens are the agency's, not yours.

Centers that keep rooms open are not re-hustling the market for strangers every quarter; they are spending on the back end, where the evidence points.

One causal result in the research is the retention payment: 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.

A payment tied to staying — not a signing bonus for someone who has not started — changed enough stay-or-go decisions to move a whole program's staffing math.

On pay, the practical benchmark is whoever is actually bidding for your teachers.

The public-school median of $27.29 an hour is not a number a budget paying the industry median meets outright — but knowing it tells you what you are bidding against, and quoting a real range in your postings shows candidates you have done the math.

Where the wage cannot move, the predictable parts of the job can: schedules people can plan a life around, breaks that do not depend on luck, and a career ladder with credential funding attached where the program can fund it.

The full playbook lives in the retention guide — the retention-payment structure, the schedule and director practices, the career ladders with funding attached.

The front end still matters: post the opening through the channels that reach early educators — where to post childcare jobs compares them — and treat strong applications as same-week work.

It also helps to see what candidates see on the childcare teacher jobs page, because candidates read job listings like these as they compare offers.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. For a licensed center, ratio and coverage requirements are set by your state child care licensing agency, and pay decisions carry employment-law obligations — confirm specifics with your licensing agency, your state labor department, or employment counsel before you act.