How to hire a Head Start director: qualifications, pay, where to recruit and how to screen

A Head Start director runs a federally funded early-education program under the Head Start Program Performance Standards (45 CFR 1302), administered by the Office of Head Start. BLS draws the line between this seat and a private-center director plainly: at independently owned centers the director follows the owner's guidelines, at chains the director must meet the parent organization's standards, and Head Start directors follow HHS requirements.

The work itself looks like any director's — BLS lists supervising teachers and childcare workers, hiring and training staff, providing professional development, setting and communicating policies, developing educational programs and preparing budgets — but in a Head Start program each of those duties answers to a federal grant. Decide which seat you are filling before you write the posting: a grantee-wide program director, a center-level director inside a larger grantee, or one of the content-area managers.

Larger grantees split the leadership layer into named seats with their own federal minimums. Education managers and coordinators (including curriculum specialists) need a bachelor's or advanced degree in early childhood education — or a bachelor's or advanced degree plus equivalent ECE coursework and early education teaching experience, under Head Start Act section 648A. Fiscal officers hired after November 7, 2016 must be CPAs or hold at least a bachelor's in accounting, business, fiscal management or a related field, and family, health and disabilities managers need at least a bachelor's. If those seats already exist, your director hire is coordination and governance; if they don't, you are hiring the whole leadership layer in one search.

Governance is the part a private-center owner doesn't have. Under Head Start Act section 642(c), the Policy Council must approve and submit to the governing body program personnel policies and decisions regarding the employment of program staff, and the governing body approves personnel policies covering the hiring, evaluation, compensation and termination of the Executive Director, Head Start Director, HR Director, Chief Fiscal Officer and equivalent positions. The director hire runs through both tables — put those approvals on the search calendar from day one.

Budget for the long arc, too. Under the Designation Renewal System, a grantee that meets none of seven conditions keeps its funding for five years without competition, and communities where a grantee meets a condition are opened to competition — conditions worth putting in front of director candidates from the first interview. And plan the coverage around the job as BLS describes it: directors are on site while the center is open, sometimes more than 40 hours a week, with directors and assistant directors staggering schedules in larger centers so someone is always on site.

This page covers the grantee director seat; where your program also holds a state child care license, your state's director rules are a separate layer — confirm them with your state child care licensing agency. For the candidate's view of the role, our career guide explains what a Head Start director does across a program year. Staffing the whole program? Start from our guide to hiring for your childcare center.

The director is a program-leadership hire rather than a classroom seat, so the bar that matters before the first day has two parts: the federal qualification rule for the seat itself, and the clearance checks that decide when a new hire may have unsupervised access to children.

Start with the qualification floor. Current Head Start rules at 45 CFR 1302.91(b) require a Head Start director hired after November 7, 2016 to have at least a bachelor's degree and experience in staff supervision, fiscal management and administration. Screen for the four components separately — the degree, then documented experience in each of the three areas — because a resume that shows one rarely shows all.

Then the clearance sequence that gates the start date, for this hire and every hire. Before hiring, a program must interview the candidate, verify references, run a sex offender registry check and obtain either a state or tribal or an FBI fingerprint criminal history check. All four come before hire. Only the other fingerprint check (state or tribal, or FBI, whichever was not obtained before hire), plus the child abuse and neglect state registry check where available, may be finished after hire, within 90 days, and the new hire may have no unsupervised access to children until the full process is complete. The complete check repeats at least once every five years.

Read all of it as current as of October 2026, because it is rule text under active revision. On August 7, 2026, ACF proposed rescinding and replacing the Head Start Program Performance Standards, with comments closing October 6, 2026; under the proposal, Head Start would keep only the statutory staff qualifications and drop the regulatory ones — including the director's. None of this is settled: the director bachelor's rule is current law and subject to a pending 2026 proposal to remove it.

Head Start rules were in active rulemaking as this page was written. Confirm the current director qualification and background-check requirements with the Office of Head Start — and your state's layer with your state child care licensing agency — before you post, screen or offer.

BLS does not break Head Start out of the administrator occupation, so no wage figure should ever be presented as "Head Start director pay." The occupation that fits the seat is education and childcare administrators, preschool and daycare (SOC 11-9031): BLS OEWS May 2025 puts the U.S. median at $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. Read the percentiles as a distribution, not a menu — a 10th-percentile figure is not an entry-level offer, and a 90th-percentile figure is not one you must match.

The industry cut sits close to the national one: within child care services (NAICS 6244), the same occupation counted 60,540 directors at a median of $58,090 a year. Where the employer sits moves the number more — school-employed 11-9031 directors had a median of $76,220, and directors in religious organizations $63,590. The field of Head Start employers is itself mixed: local governments, school districts, tribes, 501(c)(3) nonprofits, for-profit organizations and small businesses can all hold grants, so benchmark against the employers in your community that your candidates actually compare you to. For the state-level numbers behind the series, see our Head Start director salary page.

Then budget past the median, because the director you hire will manage the compliance clock the 2024 rule set: pay parity for Head Start teachers with the local district's public-school preschool teachers by August 1, 2031, and health care access, paid leave and short-term behavioral health services for full-time staff working 30 or more hours a week by August 1, 2028 — with agencies of 200 or fewer funded slots exempt from the specific wage and benefit rules. ACF proposed removing the wage and benefit requirements on May 12, 2026, and no final rule had been published as of October 5, 2026 — treat the timelines as scheduled, not settled, and confirm the rule's status before building a multi-year pay scale on it.

Classification and overtime for a salaried director are wage-and-hour questions: take them to the Department of Labor or your employment counsel rather than assuming the job title settles them.

You are hiring in a small, replacement-driven market. BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook counts 91,900 preschool and childcare center director jobs as of 2025, with 72 percent in child daycare services — a count that includes the self-employed and does not break Head Start out. BLS projects employment of directors to decline 3 percent from 2025 to 2035, with 5,200 openings a year, all from replacement needs — so the realistic bench is mostly people already running or supporting early-education programs.

Start inside your own program. The standards staff your bench for you: education managers and coordinators hold at least a bachelor's under Head Start Act section 648A, Head Start coaches must hold at least a bachelor's in ECE or a related field, and the coaching strategy every program must run has you assess all education staff and coach with observation, feedback and modeling — a natural place to spot director-ready candidates. In a multi-site grantee, center-level directors and assistant directors are the first internal names to look at for a program-director seat.

The classroom workforce under that bench is large: BLS counted 518,910 childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) and 478,780 preschool teachers except special education (SOC 25-2011) nationwide as of May 2025, counts that span schools, centers and homes. Post where early educators already look — our Head Start director jobs page shows what candidates see, and our guide to where to post the job compares the channels.

Write the posting to the law. An ad that shows a preference based on a protected trait is illegal — the EEOC's own examples include ads seeking "females" or "recent college graduates" — so "young and energetic" has no place in a posting. And if you boost the posting on Facebook or Instagram, Meta requires employment ads to run under its Special Ad Category, which limits or blocks age, gender and ZIP-code targeting for US advertisers.

Put the pay range in the posting where a pay-transparency law requires one. Eight states verified from primary sources require ranges in job postings, each with its own employer-size threshold: California (15 or more employees), Colorado (all employers, benefits included), New York (4 or more), Washington (15 or more), Illinois (15 or more), Minnesota (30 or more), Massachusetts (25 or more, since October 29, 2025) and Vermont (5 or more). Other states have been reported to require ranges; we did not verify them against primary sources, so confirm your state labor department's current rule before you post.

Screen in stages and run the checks in parallel, not after. The current Performance Standards require, before hiring: an interview, reference checks, a sex offender registry check and either a state or tribal or an FBI fingerprint criminal history check. Paper-screen against the qualification rule — the bachelor's degree and documented experience in staff supervision, fiscal management and administration — then interview, with the registry and fingerprint work running alongside. Only the other fingerprint check (whichever of state or tribal, or FBI, was not obtained before hire), plus the child abuse and neglect registry check where available, may finish after hire, within 90 days, with no unsupervised access to children until everything clears, and the full check repeats every five years. Our guide to background-check steps walks the components and the order they run in.

Test for the job's actual levers, not generic leadership. Governance: how would they work with a Policy Council that must approve personnel policies and employment decisions, and a governing body that approves the policies covering the director's own hiring, evaluation, compensation and termination? Compliance: how would they track the five-year recheck calendar for every employee, and which of the seven Designation Renewal System conditions would they watch? Instructional leadership: how would they run a coaching strategy that assesses all education staff and uses coaches trained in adult learning and data use? Strong answers describe systems, calendars and governance relationships — not vision statements.

Verify the credentials, not the resume lines. Collect the degree transcript, and ask for artifacts of the three experience areas: a budget they managed, a team they supervised, an administration or grant cycle they owned. For candidates from other grantees, push reference checks past a supervisor to someone who saw the governance work — a governing body or Policy Council chair.

Keep the screen 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 — for a director seat, that means governance, fiscal and program leadership, not family circumstances or health history.

This page publishes no average time-to-fill — our research found no verified one for Head Start directors — so plan backwards from the day the program needs its director and measure your own last search. The clocks that are set for you are the checks: the interview, references, sex offender registry check and one fingerprint check before the first day, the other fingerprint check plus the child abuse and neglect registry check within 90 days, no unsupervised access to children until everything is complete, and a full recheck every five years.

The calendar you can predict is your own governance. Policy Council approval of employment decisions and governing-body approval of the personnel policies covering the director seat both run on meeting cycles — get those dates on the calendar before you post, because a signed offer that waits on the next scheduled meeting is the avoidable delay in this hire. If your personnel policies need updating for a new seat, that work belongs before the posting, not after the offer.

Compress what you control: how long the posting runs, how fast interviews get scheduled, how quickly references answer, how soon you decide. Batch interviews into one week so candidates stay comparable, set a decision date and tell the candidate what it is, and keep the runner-up warm until the first hire signs.

How long a director stays is not well measured: the sources we read turned up no verified turnover figure for Head Start directors, so we won't quote one. What the evidence does support is that money conditioned on staying changes behavior — the best causal evidence we hold is a study of child care teachers. 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 percent, versus nearly a quarter of non-recipients leaving within eight months. Set any stay incentive from your own budget; the study we cite tests an amount, it doesn't prescribe one.

The standards themselves build retention architecture your director will administer — and benefit from. The 2024 rule requires health care access, paid leave and short-term behavioral health services for full-time staff working 30 or more hours a week by August 1, 2028, and pay parity for Head Start teachers with the local district's public-school preschool teachers by August 1, 2031. ACF's pending proposals would remove the wage and benefit rules, so treat both timelines as scheduled, not settled, and confirm status before promising either in an offer letter. The coaching strategy the standards require — observation, feedback and modeling for education staff from coaches trained in adult learning and data use — works only if leadership stays stable enough to run it.

The rest is practical. Put governance relationships on the onboarding plan: early introductions to Policy Council members and governing body members, and a written map of which personnel decisions need whose approval. Review pay against the administrator market once a year instead of once a resignation, and design the coverage and staggered schedules that make an on-site director job survivable. And remember what continuity buys: under the Designation Renewal System, a grantee that meets none of seven conditions keeps funding for five years without competition — five years in which one leadership transition can cost institutional knowledge you cannot quickly rebuild.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. The Head Start Program Performance Standards are administered by the Office of Head Start; confirm qualification, background-check and pay-rule status with the Office of Head Start and your state child care licensing agency, and wage-and-hour questions with the Department of Labor or your employment counsel.