How to hire a preschool teacher: qualifications, pay, where to recruit and how to screen

A preschool teacher is the lead of your preschool room — the classroom for three- to five-year-olds, the year or two before kindergarten. In a center or a standalone preschool, they own the room: the lesson plans, the daily schedule, the family communication, the assessments and, when you staff one, the direction of an assistant or aide.

Before you post, decide which seat you are hiring. A lead teacher plans curriculum and answers for the room; an assistant supports one; an aide or floater covers breaks and transitions. If what you need is a second adult in the room rather than someone who runs it, hire an assistant and say so — a lead title over assistant duties misdescribes the seat you are actually filling.

Scope the seat to the schedule you actually run. A lead who opens the building, one who covers the pre-K room until close, and one who floats between two rooms are different jobs with different qualification and pay answers. Write down the duties, the hours and the age group first — that list becomes your posting, your screen and your offer.

Our career-side guide explains what a preschool teacher does across a full day in the room. Use it to draw the line between lead duties and assistant duties before you write a word of the posting.

Start from your state's rule, not from a template. The state child care licensing agency sets who may hold the teacher seat in a licensed center, and the education, experience and credential it takes are written in your state's rule — they can differ for lead teachers, assistants and aides, and they can depend on your center's license. Ask your licensing consultant to confirm, before you post the job, which qualification the seat requires, so you screen candidates against the right bar.

Underneath the state rule sits a federal floor. 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 and child abuse recognition and reporting. Put the orientation modules in your new hire's first weeks, not the back half of the window.

One credential to know by name is the CDA, the Child Development Associate credential: it is awarded by the Council for Professional Recognition, and the Council offers it in a center-based Preschool setting for ages 3 to 5, among others. When a candidate lists one, verify it with the Council rather than taking the certificate at face value, and collect transcripts and certificates for everything else the seat requires.

Then the background check. Under the CCDF rule at 45 CFR 98.43(d)(4), a new hire may begin work 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. Your state's rule may be stricter — its licensing agency sets your start-date rule. Our guide to background-check steps walks the components and the sequence.

Rules differ by state and change. Confirm the teacher qualification, training and background-check rules that apply to your center's license with your state child care licensing agency before you post or offer.

Benchmark before you budget. BLS's OEWS survey for May 2025 puts preschool teachers except special education (SOC 25-2011) at a U.S. median of $18.34 an hour ($38,140 a year), with the 10th percentile at $13.94 an hour and the 90th at $29.52. The band at the top of this page — $34,530 to $47,550 — is the same release's 25th to 75th percentile in annual terms. These are all-industry figures across every setting that employs preschool teachers, not a recommendation for your market.

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 an overpayment — it is what the top of the market pays. For state-level numbers, see our preschool teacher salary data.

Two reference points shape who you are bidding against. Within private child care services (NAICS 6244), the preschool-teacher median is $17.72 an hour — below the $18.34 all-industry median. But preschool teachers in elementary and secondary schools — public pre-K settings — had a May 2025 median of $27.29 an hour ($56,750 a year), far above the child care industry median. When a school district posts a pre-K job, that is the scale your candidate can see too.

Don't assume a salary makes a preschool teacher exempt from overtime. Under the FLSA, teachers of kindergarten or nursery school pupils can be exempt with no minimum salary — but only if their primary duty is teaching and they are employed in an "educational establishment," and the regulation counts nursery school programs as elementary education only "in some States." Many daycare teachers are therefore not overtime-exempt, so budget for overtime unless the exemption clearly applies, and confirm the classification with the Department of Labor or your employment counsel.

The pool is large and the competition is close to home. BLS counted 478,780 preschool teachers (SOC 25-2011) and 518,910 childcare workers nationwide as of May 2025 — and 347,720 of those preschool teachers worked in private child care services, the industry you are hiring into. Start from two pools: the assistants already on your roster, who your hiring process has already screened, and experienced teachers at other centers, who will need a reason to move.

Work the channels in order of fit: the job boards early educators already read; your state's early childhood career page or professional-development registry careers section, if your state runs one; early childhood education program career services at nearby community colleges; CDA and ECE degree cohorts; and staff referrals — rewarded, not just requested. See what candidates see before you write the posting: our preschool teacher jobs page shows the live market, and our guide to where to post the job compares the channels.

Write the posting to the rules. 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.

Write it to the EEOC's line, too: 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 preschool teacher posting. And 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.

Screen in stages, and keep the expensive checks late. Paper-screen against the duty list you wrote first; run a short phone screen; then a structured interview; then a working observation in a preschool room; then references with a previous director or supervisor; then the background check; then the offer. Each stage should earn the next one.

Interview with scenarios from your rooms, not with self-descriptions. Ask what they do when a child bites twice in one morning, how they tell a family something their child struggled with, how they plan a week when half the class is out sick, and what they do the moment an assistant steps out of the room. Strong answers talk about supervision, positive guidance, documentation and families treated as the center's customers — not about loving children.

Keep it 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 race, sex, national origin, disability, age, religion, color or ancestry.

Make the working observation a real slice of the day: circle time, free play, a transition, a handoff to families at pickup. Describe the job's physical demands — lifting children, floor work — as the essential functions they are, with room for accommodation, rather than as a screen-out line. Watch how the candidate gets down to a child's level, whether their eyes travel the room while another adult talks, and how they handle the first refusal. Under the FLSA, work a candidate performs — even work you did not request but permitted — is work time that must be paid. DOL guidance doesn't address "working interviews" by name, so pay for the slice you use and confirm the details with the Wage and Hour Division.

Call references yourself. Two questions do most of the work: what was this teacher responsible for planning, and would you put them in charge of a preschool room again? Ask for a specific time the teacher handled a hard behavior or a hard family conversation — specifics recall better than adjectives.

Plan backwards from the day you need the room covered, and separate what you control from what you don't. Yours: how long the posting runs, how fast you schedule interviews, how quickly references get called, how soon you decide. Not yours: your state's background-check turnaround, the candidate's notice period if they teach somewhere now, and any state paperwork your licensing consultant flags for a new hire. This page doesn't publish an average time-to-fill, because no source behind it supports one — measure your own last search instead.

Two clocks are set for you. The fingerprint rule comes first: a new hire may begin work after a qualifying result on either the FBI or the in-state fingerprint check, and until every component clears they work only under supervision (45 CFR 98.43(d)(4)) — so start the check the day you make the offer and build your start date around it. The CCDF training clock comes second: pre-service health-and-safety training is a three-month requirement, so the orientation modules belong in the hire's first weeks. Confirm both timetables with your state child care licensing agency — states can be stricter than the federal rule.

Then compress what you control. Batch interviews into the same week so candidates stay comparable; set a decision date and tell candidates what it is; keep the runner-up warm until the first hire signs. A posting that sits for weeks with no decision reads to strong candidates like a center that isn't sure it is hiring.

The hire pays off only if it holds. Our research found no single national turnover rate for early educators: the published estimates we checked come from individual studies, and we have not confirmed them against the primary studies behind them. A Minneapolis Fed analysis of the 2019 NSECE found annual turnover of 21.1 percent among center teachers in centers other than school-sponsored ones, against 7.7 percent in school-sponsored centers; research on Louisiana centers found rates as high as 46 percent, and a Virginia study put annual center teacher turnover at 36 to 38 percent. Treat them as a spread, not a benchmark for your center.

The clearest causal evidence we found on keeping early educators is money conditioned on 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 percent, versus nearly a quarter of non-recipients leaving within eight months — and it was tested on teachers, the role this page is about. Set any stay incentive from your own budget; nothing in the research behind this page fixes an amount.

Then run the job so staying makes sense. Under the FLSA's training-time rule, training is unpaid only if it falls outside regular hours, is truly voluntary, is not directly job-related and involves no productive work — and attendance you require, such as your state's licensing modules or the annual professional development you expect, is not voluntary. Required training is therefore generally paid work time, not an unpaid expectation; confirm how your state treats training hours before you schedule them off the clock. Fund the credential path, from the CDA onward, as growth rather than treating it as the teacher's problem. Give the lead teacher real ownership of the room you hired them to run, and review their pay against the market once a year.

When you are ready to build the rest of the roster around this hire — assistants, floaters, a second lead — start from our guide to hiring for your childcare center.

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.