How much should you pay a preschool teacher to compete with public pre-K?

Three BLS benchmarks frame the decision, all from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release for May 2025.

Preschool teachers, except special education (SOC 25-2011), earn a U.S. median of $18.34 an hour ($38,140 a year) across every setting, with a 10th-to-90th-percentile spread of $13.94 to $29.52.

Within private child care services (NAICS 6244) — the industry your center operates in — the median for the same occupation is $17.72 an hour, and childcare workers (SOC 39-9011) median $16.43.

Both industry medians sit below the all-industry medians for their occupations.

The competitor number is the third benchmark.

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

For scale one rung up the school ladder, kindergarten teachers (SOC 25-2012) earn a U.S. median of $62,680 a year.

A candidate weighing your posting against a school-based pre-K role is weighing it against that $27.29 figure, whatever your local market does to it.

These are national medians, and they will not price your classrooms by themselves.

The all-settings median blends the very settings the industry tables split apart below — child care services on one side, elementary and secondary schools on the other — and a percentile is not a pay scale: the 10th is not entry-level pay and the 90th is not a ceiling.

Pull your own state row before you set a range: preschool teacher salary data carries the state-level BLS figures for SOC 25-2011.

Why the gap is hard to close with rate alone: a September 2021 U.S. Treasury report said most for-profit child care facilities operate on razor-thin profit margins, usually below 1 percent, and — citing a Center for American Progress cost analysis — put wages at no less than 50-60 percent of child care expenses on U.S. averages, with labor's share larger for infant care.

Matching the school median across a full teaching team is hard to fund at those margins.

Whether states require public pre-K programs to pay teachers at parity with the public schools was not confirmed by our research — the parity table we attempted to read was not recoverable — so check with the agency that administers your state's pre-K program before assuming a parity rule in your market.

Read the gap from the candidate's side too: browse preschool teacher jobs to see what postings in your market are actually offering.

Start with what the sources do not say: our research found no verified dollar premium for a CDA or an early childhood degree in preschool teacher pay.

The BLS wage tables we hold do not split the occupation by credential, so any "degree bump" percentage you run into is an estimate, and budgeting from one is guessing with payroll.

What the data does show is where credential value gets priced.

The occupation's spread runs from $13.94 at the 10th percentile to $29.52 at the 90th around the $18.34 median, and nothing in the tables we hold attributes that spread to credentials or to any other single factor.

The largest priced difference in these figures is the setting split: $17.72 as the child care industry median against $27.29 in elementary and secondary schools, with kindergarten teachers at $62,680 a year above that.

That is the ladder the school system holds out — the premium your strongest candidates can collect somewhere else, not a number you owe every credentialed applicant.

So price the premium you can control, and define it first.

Decide what a degree-holding or CDA-holding preschool teacher actually does differently in your building — leading the room, mentoring assistants, owning curriculum and family communication — and pay that defined difference as a written step: announced before the coursework starts, paid when the credential lands, sized to your own market data and margins.

An unpriced promise ("we reward education here") costs the same loyalty as a priced one and buys none of it back.

If you are still deciding whether the credential belongs in the role's requirements at all, that is a hiring question before it is a pay question — our guide to hiring a preschool teacher covers qualifications and screening, and your state child care licensing agency sets whatever minimum applies to the title in your state.

An hourly rate only compares cleanly between jobs with the same paid hours.

What a candidate lives on is rate multiplied by paid weeks, so a full-year calendar at one rate and a school-year calendar at a higher one are not comparable numbers until you annualize them.

Make the comparison easy and honest in both directions: if your program runs full-year, put the annual figure or the paid-week count in the posting; if you run a school-year calendar, say exactly which weeks are paid and what, if anything, is available across the summer.

That is the lever: your calendar is part of compensation, and it is the part of an offer a rate-to-rate comparison hides.

A year of known, steady income is a real thing to offer — and it only counts if you say it out loud.

Do not make the candidate do the annualization math alone.

More hours raises the overtime question. A year-round or extended-day schedule puts more hours on every teacher, and federal overtime rules — not your pay philosophy — decide what those hours cost.

Under the FLSA teacher exemption, teachers of kindergarten or nursery school pupils can be exempt from overtime with no minimum salary requirement, but only if their primary duty is teaching and they are employed in an "educational establishment." Whether a child care center qualifies depends on state law: the regulation counts nursery school programs toward elementary education only "in some States," and many daycare teachers are therefore not overtime-exempt.

Staff whose primary duty is not teaching — aides and assistants — do not meet the exemption's test.

The contrast is worth knowing: the general white-collar exemptions carry a $684-a-week salary test under the current regulation, while the teacher exemption carries no salary test at all.

Hours you require are hours you pay for. Training, meetings and lectures are unpaid only when all four federal tests are met — outside regular hours, truly voluntary, not directly job-related, and no productive work performed — so state-mandated licensing training is generally paid work time.

Build it into the schedule and the budget rather than treating onboarding hours as free.

Confirm classification before you post a salary. Exempt-or-non-exempt treatment is wage-and-hour law, not a pay-strategy choice.

Confirm each role's treatment with the U.S. Department of Labor or your employment counsel before the posting goes up.

When the rate cannot reach the school median, the rest of the offer has to carry measurable value — and several benefits come with tax rules that set how much of the value can stay tax-free, which makes them easier to defend in an offer letter than a vague promise of culture.

Three structures do real work here.

Staff child care. Free or discounted on-site child care provided to staff counts as dependent care assistance under a written, nondiscriminatory dependent care assistance program (DCAP), and for 2026 the dependent care exclusion is $7,500 per year ($3,750 if married filing separately).

If the discount runs through the separate employee-discount exclusion instead, tax-free treatment caps at 20 percent of the price charged to non-employee customers.

The two structures treat the same benefit differently, so confirm the design with a tax advisor before you promise it.

Health money without a group plan. A qualified small employer health reimbursement arrangement (QSEHRA) is available to employers with fewer than 50 full-time-equivalent employees that offer no group health plan; for 2026 it can reimburse up to $6,450 for self-only coverage or $13,100 for family coverage.

For a small center that has never offered health benefits, that is a concrete line an offer letter can carry.

The building side. If on-site care is the benefit you are weighing, the federal employer-provided child care credit — section 45F — applies to amounts paid after December 31, 2025; our 45F tax credit guide carries the credit percentages, the caps and the small-business tests, and it is the page to price a care benefit against.

The fuller menu of low-cost options sits in our guide to childcare staff benefits.

If you close a gap with a sign-on or referral bonus instead, budget it as wages: bonuses are subject to employment taxes, and federal income tax on supplemental wages may be withheld at a flat 22 percent.

Whatever the package, put it in the posting — a benefit a candidate cannot see does not offset anything.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Wage figures are BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Confirm wage-hour questions with the U.S. Department of Labor or your employment counsel, tax questions with a tax advisor, and any state pre-K pay or staff-qualification rule with the agency that administers it in your state.