How to become a Head Start or Early Head Start grantee

Head Start grants are competed awards.

The Office of Head Start (OHS) posts notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs) to solicit applications for grant funds to specific service areas, or for a national competition, and applications are submitted through Grants.gov.

The same two-step structure covers Early Head Start.

Each notice is competition-specific: it solicits applications for a named service area or a national scope, and its instructions, deadlines and requirements are what an application responds to.

The Office of Head Start runs the process; Grants.gov is the channel the application goes through.

Competition is also how existing funding continues — or moves.

Under the Designation Renewal System (DRS), seven conditions determine whether a grantee qualifies for continued funding: grantees that meet none of the seven keep their funding for five years without competing for it, and communities where the grantee meets a condition are opened to competition.

For a would-be grantee, the DRS is the map of where opportunities surface.

An incumbent that meets none of the seven conditions holds its award — five years, no competition — while a service area whose grantee trips a condition goes back out to applicants.

New organizations enter when a NOFO opens a service area, so watching which communities are posted, and why, is part of the work.

The notice controls. A competition's deadlines, priorities and requirements are set out in its NOFO.

Confirm the terms of the competition you are eyeing directly on headstart.gov and Grants.gov before you build an application calendar around anything else.

Early Head Start grants move through the same machinery as Head Start: the Office of Head Start posts the NOFOs and applications go through Grants.gov.

What the Early Head Start track adds is a second route built alongside it — the EHS-Child Care Partnership award.

The eligibility list is broad.

Eligible Head Start applicants include local governments, school districts, tribes, 501(c)(3) nonprofits, for-profit organizations and small businesses.

EHS-Child Care Partnership grants are open to public, nonprofit and for-profit entities, including faith-based organizations — worth knowing if you operate, or are building, a child care business and are weighing which federal award your structure can compete for.

For any partnership competition, the notice is the document that defines what applicants respond to — its scope, service area and requirements.

Start there, with the Office of Head Start's grant-application guidance on headstart.gov as the layer over it.

The staffing obligations below are the ones the Head Start Act and the Performance Standards place on programs; how a partnership competition distributes them between grantee and partners is something to confirm in that competition's notice — read both before you size the partnership roster you would be promising.

Winning the award converts your organization into a Head Start agency, and the Head Start Program Performance Standards apply to your staffing.

Four of those obligations shape the roster you put in your application.

Governance comes first. Under Section 642(c) of the Head Start Act, the program's Policy Council must approve — and submit to the governing body — the program's personnel policies and its decisions regarding the employment of program staff.

The governing body, in turn, approves the personnel policies covering hiring, evaluation, compensation and termination for the Executive Director, the Head Start Director, the HR Director, the Chief Fiscal Officer and equivalent positions.

That leadership layer, and the approval cycle behind it, is part of what the grant has to run.

Every hire runs a federal background gate. Before hiring, the program must interview the candidate, verify references, run a sex offender registry check, and obtain either a state or tribal fingerprint criminal history check or an FBI one.

The rest — the remaining fingerprint check and the child abuse and neglect state registry check, where one is available — come due within 90 days after hire, and a new hire may not have unsupervised access to children until the full process is complete.

Each employee, consultant and contractor repeats a complete background check at least once every five years.

These are the current rules, but ACF's August 2026 proposal to rescind and replace the Performance Standards would drop the standards' own background-check procedures, including the five-year re-check; ACF says statutory requirements and state CCDBG-aligned background checks would still apply.

It is a proposal, not a final rule, so confirm where it stands with the Office of Head Start.

That pipeline, and the supervised coverage it requires, belongs in the staffing plan you attach to the application.

Coaching is a staffing line, not a bonus. The standards require a research-based, coordinated coaching strategy: the program assesses all education staff, offers intensive coaching — observation, feedback and modeling — to those identified for it, and uses a coach with adequate training in adult learning and data use.

Someone qualified to deliver that belongs on the roster or under contract.

Classroom and support roles carry qualification floors. The role-by-role requirements — degrees, CDAs and enrollment pathways for teachers, assistants, directors and family-facing staff — are laid out in our Head Start staffing rules guide.

One flag before you plan credentials around them: ACF's August 2026 proposal to rescind and replace the Performance Standards would keep only the qualifications the Head Start Act itself requires and drop the regulatory ones for directors, family child care providers, coaches, family services staff and health professionals.

It is a proposal, not a final rule — the current requirements still govern — so confirm where the rulemaking stands with the Office of Head Start before you tie a hire to a multi-year credential plan.

The process the Office of Head Start publishes gives you a short list of moves, in order:

1. Find the NOFO for your community. The Office of Head Start posts notices of funding opportunities for specific service areas and for national competitions; the grant-application section of headstart.gov — including its NOFO locator — is where they sit.
2. Confirm your organization is an eligible applicant. Local governments, school districts, tribes, 501(c)(3) nonprofits, for-profit organizations and small businesses are eligible Head Start applicants, and EHS-Child Care Partnership awards are open to public, nonprofit and for-profit entities including faith-based organizations.
3. Apply through Grants.gov. Grants.gov is the submission channel for Head Start and Early Head Start applications, so set up there before the notice you want closes.
4. Read the notice as the document it is. Each NOFO states what the competition funds and for which service area; its instructions and deadlines are what governs the application.
5. Work backward from the staffing the grant requires. Whatever the notice asks you to deliver, the roster behind it has to meet the Performance Standards — map the governance, background-check and coaching obligations above into the org chart you propose.

One timing note: service areas land back in competition when an incumbent grantee meets a DRS condition, which makes the Designation Renewal System worth understanding before you choose where to apply — it tells you which communities are freshly open and which incumbents meet none of the conditions and are mid-cycle without competing.

Before you commit resources: this page explains the award process as the Office of Head Start publishes it; it does not track open competitions and does not substitute for a notice.

Current NOFOs, deadlines and application guidance live at headstart.gov and Grants.gov.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Confirm grant competitions, requirements and deadlines with the Office of Head Start at headstart.gov before you apply, and confirm any state child care licensing rules that apply to the classrooms you would staff with your state child care licensing agency.