Head Start wage and benefit requirements for grantees (pay parity rule)

The wage and benefit requirements sit in the Head Start Program Performance Standards at 45 CFR 1302.90, added by a 2024 final rule.

They are two separate obligations on two separate clocks: a salary-comparability requirement for Head Start teachers, and a benefits package for full-time staff.

The salary requirement works off a local benchmark.

Programs must pay each Head Start teacher a salary at least comparable to what public-school preschool teachers in the local district earn, adjusted for responsibilities, qualifications, experience and hours.

The district's preschool pay scale is the benchmark your teachers are measured against, with the four adjustments the rule names.

Qualifications being one of the adjustment factors, pay planning under this rule ties directly to the performance standards' qualification floors for each role.

Those floors — degree and CDA requirements by position, and the proposals that would rewrite them — are covered on our Head Start staffing rules page.

The benefits obligation is separate.

By August 1, 2028, programs must provide health care access, paid leave and short-term behavioral health services to full-time staff — defined in the rule as "those working 30 or more hours per week with the Head Start program during the program year".

One scoping note: the salary-comparability text is written about Head Start teachers, while the benefits text covers full-time staff generally.

How either provision treats a specific role — home visitors, family child care providers, floating staff — is not resolved in the sections this page summarizes, so confirm role coverage with the Office of Head Start before you model pay by position.

These are current requirements with a pending rescission proposal. Both obligations stand as of October 2026, and ACF has proposed removing them.

The deadlines and the proposal timeline are in the next section.

Two dates carry the rule.

The benefits package comes due first, on August 1, 2028.

The salary-comparability obligation for Head Start teachers follows on August 1, 2031.

The 2031 date is written as a demonstration, not just a calendar day.

The rule states, "By August 1, 2031, a program must demonstrate it has made progress to parity", so a program's position against the district benchmark is something it has to be able to document rather than assume.

The timeline is now entangled with the rulemaking.

On May 12, 2026, ACF proposed removing the wage and benefit requirements, estimating over $2 billion in future cost savings; that comment period closed June 11, 2026, and no final rule had been published as of October 5, 2026.

On August 7, 2026, ACF published a second and broader proposal to rescind and replace the entire Head Start Program Performance Standards, with comments closing October 6, 2026.

Neither proposal is final.

Until one is, the August 1, 2028 and August 1, 2031 deadlines are the operative dates for a grantee budget.

The August proposal would also restructure staff qualifications — keeping only the qualifications the Head Start Act itself requires for education managers, mentor teachers, preschool teachers and assistants, and Early Head Start teachers, and dropping the regulatory ones for directors, family child care providers, coaches, family services staff and health professionals — so a budget built on the current rule touches rules in motion on both fronts.

Re-check the Federal Register and headstart.gov before you commit a multi-year salary schedule.

The status on this page is as of October 5, 2026.

Three benefit categories are named in the rule: health care access, paid leave and short-term behavioral health services.

The deadline is August 1, 2028, and the covered group is full-time staff — those working 30 or more hours per week with the Head Start program during the program year.

What the rule sections this page summarizes do not specify is implementation detail: what counts as access to health care, how much leave satisfies the requirement, what form the short-term behavioral health benefit takes.

Our research does not capture that detail either, so design the package against the Office of Head Start's current guidance at headstart.gov rather than from this page.

The same gap applies to part-time staff.

The text summarized here defines full-time as 30 or more hours per week; our research does not capture parallel benefit terms for anyone else, so treat part-time treatment as an Office of Head Start question, not something this page can answer.

The small-agency exemption reaches the benefits deadline as much as the salary rule.

Agencies with 200 or fewer funded slots are exempt from the specific wage and benefit requirements — the next section covers how that carve-out is written.

The rule text this page summarizes records one carve-out, and it is written as an exemption rather than a waiver: agencies with 200 or fewer funded slots are exempt from the specific wage and benefit requirements.

The exemption runs to the wage and benefit rules themselves — it is not written as a pass from the Head Start Program Performance Standards as a whole.

If your agency is above that size and the cost is the problem, this page cannot tell you relief is available.

Our research did not capture a separate waiver or hardship process in the documents reviewed, and absence from our notes is not evidence that none exists — take the question directly to the Office of Head Start at headstart.gov.

The larger relief question is the rulemaking itself.

ACF proposed removing the wage and benefit requirements on May 12, 2026, and proposed rescinding and replacing the entire Performance Standards on August 7, 2026.

Neither proposal is final as of October 5, 2026, so both the requirements and the exemption described on this page stand.

The only cost figure in the record this page draws on is ACF's own: the agency estimated that removing the wage and benefit requirements would save over $2 billion in future cost savings.

That is a federal estimate published with the May 2026 proposal — not a per-grantee number, and not a projection an individual agency can lift into its own budget.

For your own budget, the inputs are local: the district preschool salary schedule your teachers will be compared against, and your roster of staff working 30 or more hours a week who fall in the benefits group.

Our research did not turn up a per-grantee cost model for the rule, so the sizing work is yours to do with those two inputs.

Pay changes are also governance events.

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

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

A parity implementation plan is a personnel policy on both counts, so it routes through the Policy Council first; compensation for the leadership positions the governing body's approval names runs through that approval directly.

Multi-year pay planning also runs on a grant clock.

Under the Designation Renewal System, a grantee that meets none of the seven conditions keeps funding for five years without competition, while a community where a grantee meets a condition is opened to competition.

A salary schedule phasing in toward August 1, 2031 can span one of those five-year funding windows, which is a reason to keep the plan revisable.

Before you commit funds: confirm the current state of the wage and benefit requirements with the Office of Head Start at headstart.gov — the proposals above are live and neither is final — and take wage-hour questions that go beyond the Head Start rules to employment counsel or the Department of Labor.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. It describes federal Head Start requirements as published through October 5, 2026; confirm the current requirements with the Office of Head Start at headstart.gov before you set pay or benefits, and check the state rules that also reach your classrooms with your state child care licensing agency.