Where to post childcare jobs: job boards, colleges and local channels that work

The board market splits in two.

A general board lists openings across every industry, childcare among them — Indeed and ZipRecruiter are two that candidates search for by name — which means reach and competition for attention in equal measure.

Niche boards carry only early-education jobs: ChildcareHires, the site you are reading, is one, and a listing on it sits in front of teachers, assistants, floaters and directors rather than a mixed general audience.

If you are deciding where to advertise childcare jobs, that difference — audience breadth versus audience fit — is the first cut.

On the general boards, mechanics matter more.

Use the job title candidates actually search — "infant teacher", "preschool assistant", "floater" — rather than an internal title, fill out the employer profile completely, and refresh or re-post when a listing ages, because a stale posting can read as a filled one.

Answer every application, including the ones you decline; a posting that goes quiet can teach candidates to skip your next one.

It also pays to see the market from the other side: browse childcare teacher jobs to see how listings read to the candidates you are trying to attract.

The same ad rules apply on every board — and off them. A job ad that shows a preference based on a protected trait is illegal under the laws the EEOC enforces; the EEOC's own examples are an ad seeking "females" or "recent college graduates," and childcare ads asking for "young, energetic" or female-only staff are exactly the pattern to avoid.

Describe the work — the age groups covered, the schedule, the qualifications the role needs — and leave age, sex and other protected traits out of the ad entirely.

That rule follows the posting wherever it runs, which is worth remembering once you reach the free channels below.

The free channels cost staff time instead of fees, and you can start every one of them this week.

None replaces a board — they compound one, because they reach people a listing never touches: the assistant who left the field and might come back, the college student home for the semester, the cook at the church across town.

Community groups come first.

Local childcare-teacher and provider groups on Facebook, neighborhood groups and community pages — join the ones covering your area, read how they treat employer posts, and post like a member rather than an advertiser: who you are, what the role is, what the pay and schedule look like, how to reach you.

One caution the moment money enters the picture: Meta requires employment ads to run under its Special Ad Category. For US advertisers, age, gender and ZIP-code targeting are limited or unavailable, and exclusion targeting, lookalike audiences and saved audiences are too.

An organic group post costs nothing; whether a paid boost of one falls under the employment-ad rules is exactly the thing to confirm on Meta's business help pages before you spend a dollar.

Then work the channels you already own.

A careers page on your center's website gives every other channel somewhere to point; a sign at the door reaches the families you serve — and the people they know; your current staff may know teachers looking for a change, and a referral ask costs nothing.

Local houses of worship and community centers that run children's programs are worth a call for the same reason: they employ people to work with children.

Free channels have one structural weakness: replies can scatter across comment threads and direct messages.

Give every channel the same destination — one email address or one application link, on your careers page — so nothing arrives somewhere nobody watches.

Any community college with an early childhood education program is a hiring channel: the students in those courses are training for exactly the chairs you are trying to fill.

Call the ECE department and the career services office and ask three questions — how employer postings get listed, when in the year students look for placements, and whether the program runs a job fair or cohort event you can attend.

Ask which courses align with the CDA as well, if CDA coursework matters to the lead-teacher qualifications your state sets — the department knows its own curriculum map better than any checklist.

The federal Work-Study program is the funded version of the same pipeline.

Under the FWS rules, "community services" explicitly include child care — including campus child care open to the community — and colleges must spend at least 7 percent of their FWS allocations on community-service jobs.

There is a catch for for-profit centers: colleges may use up to 25 percent of FWS funds for students working at private for-profit employers, and that work must be academically relevant to the student's program to the maximum extent practicable — which usually means ECE majors.

Start with the campus financial aid office and ask how a work-study placement at your center would be counted and funded.

T.E.A.C.H.

Early Childhood scholarships turn the same pipeline into a retention tool.

The model is cost-shared: it pays most of tuition, books and travel, often requires paid release time from the sponsoring employer — that is you — awards a bonus or raise when the recipient completes credit hours, and requires the recipient to stay with the sponsoring program for a set period afterward.

Sponsoring a capable assistant through T.E.A.C.H. is how you grow a lead teacher you already trust.

The T.E.A.C.H.

National Center's directory (as of October 2026) lists programs in 21 states — Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont and Wisconsin — with Tennessee listed for WAGE$ only.

That is not every state, so check the directory before you plan around one.

Your state and local workforce boards are the public-side counterpart to the college pipeline, and they are worth the call before you spend anything on ads.

Ask the board covering your county how an employer lists openings, what employer services exist, and whether any early-childhood-specific programs — apprenticeship, on-the-job training, hiring events — are active near you.

Programs and funding rounds change, so treat the first call as reconnaissance rather than a commitment.

One program to ask about by name is registered apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship.gov, the federal apprenticeship site, lists "Early Childhood Educator" and "Early Childhood/PRE-K Teacher" among education-sector apprenticeship occupations.

Where a sponsor operates near you, an apprentice arrives with structured training attached: the federal standards at 29 CFR 29.5 set a term of at least 2,000 hours of on-the-job learning (time-based), demonstrated competency, or a hybrid of the two; recommend a minimum of 144 hours of related instruction per year; and require a progressively increasing wage schedule that starts at no less than the FLSA minimum wage.

The Department of Labor's registered apprenticeship system oversees those standards, and your workforce board or the ECE department at your college can tell you whether a sponsor works in your area.

The other call is to your local child care resource and referral (CCR&R) agency.

Ask what employer-facing services it runs and whether openings can be listed with it — a job bank, a candidate list, hiring events.

Our research did not compile which CCR&Rs operate job banks, so treat this as a phone call to make rather than a promise; if you cannot find your local agency, your state child care licensing agency may be able to point you to it.

The same applies to the workforce boards — what exists is local, and the local answer is the one that counts.

No prices on this page — on purpose. Job-board advertising prices were not verified in our research; when we checked, Indeed's pricing page could not be read.

So this page quotes no board prices, and you should be skeptical of any secondhand number: budget from each board's own current pricing page, and re-check it before you renew anything, because packages change.

What we can give you is the cost shape of each channel.

Boards charge for listings or promotion where they charge at all; this site's own posting prices are on the pricing page.

The free local channels trade fees for staff hours.

The college and workforce channels cost relationship-building time, and their funded programs carry their own mechanics — sponsoring a T.E.A.C.H. scholar, for instance, often means the paid release time the program requires from the sponsoring employer, plus a commitment to employ the recipient for a set period after completion.

Any placement fees a staffing agency charges were not verified in our research, and agencies carry a compliance note: under the federal CCDF background-check rules, the definition of "child care staff member" covers anyone employed by a provider for compensation, including contract employees and self-employed individuals — so an agency temp or a contracted substitute needs the same checks as a direct hire.

Confirm the check sequence for a temp placement with your state child care licensing agency before the first shift.

Wherever you post, some states dictate what the posting must carry. The pay-transparency rules verified from primary sources attach to the posting itself, so a listing on a board or your own careers page has to carry whatever your state requires of one; whether an informal social post counts as an "advertisement" is a question for your state labor department:

• California — employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale in any job posting (Labor Code 432.3).
• Colorado — the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act requires employers to disclose compensation in all job postings and notices, internal and public, including benefits information.
• New York — Labor Law 194-b requires businesses with four or more employees to list compensation ranges in postings for jobs, promotions and transfers.
• Washington — employers with 15 or more employees must disclose the wage scale or salary range and a general description of benefits in each job posting (RCW 49.58.110).
• Illinois — employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale and benefits in any specific job posting; a hyperlink to a public page with that information satisfies the rule (820 ILCS 112/10(b-25)).
• Minnesota — employers with 30 or more employees in Minnesota must include a good-faith salary range in job postings (Minn. Stat. 181.173).
• Massachusetts — since October 29, 2025, employers with 25 or more employees must disclose wage ranges in job postings.
• Vermont — employers with five or more employees must include the compensation or range of compensation in any advertisement of a Vermont job opening.

Tracker reports add Maryland, New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington DC, Maine, Virginia and Connecticut (from October 1, 2026), with Delaware scheduled for 2027 — but our research did not confirm those against state sources, so check with your state labor department before you rely on either list.

If your posting must carry a range, set it from data rather than a guess: the childcare worker salary page carries BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics figures for SOC 39-9011 by state from the May 2025 release, and the local market is the range you will actually hire in.

Channel by channel, the pattern repeats: no single board or bulletin fills a classroom on its own, and the mix matters more than any one pick.

Posting is also only the first step in hiring for your childcare center — the screening, interviewing and pay guides start from who the posting brings in.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Job-ad rules come from the agencies that enforce them — the EEOC for employment advertising, your state labor department for pay-transparency laws, and Meta's own business help pages for paid promotion — and background-check requirements come from your state child care licensing agency. Confirm the current rules with each before you post or spend.