Childcare centers and preschools hiring childcare directors on ChildcareHires post a median of $57,750 a year, across 115 employers and 237 listings that state annual pay (October 15, 2026).
The middle half of those listings offer $54,000 to $70,000.
This is advertised pay, not earnings: for what childcare directors take home, see our childcare director salary guide.
Listings per pay band.
The highlighted band holds the employer median of $57,750/yr.
Employer median of posted annual pay for each role with at least 30 listings and 10 employers stating it.
States with at least 30 listings and 10 employers stating annual pay.
Other states are too thin to report on their own.
| State | Employer median | Listing median | Listings | Employers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | $55,000/yr | $55,000/yr | 32 | 20 |
Posted pay is what employers advertise to attract applicants.
It often runs above government wage estimates for the same occupation, because listings skew toward open, competitive roles and the ranges often include the top of a pay band.
Our childcare director salary guide blends listing data with Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data to estimate what people in the role actually earn.
Use this page for what the market is offering today, and the guide for typical earnings.
All figures come from the 16,123 active job listings on ChildcareHires on October 15, 2026, posted by 3,254 employers.
We removed 533 exact duplicates (same employer, title, city, state and pay range) first.
Posted pay is the midpoint of the range an employer advertises, or its single figure.
Hourly and annual postings are analyzed separately and never converted into each other.
Values below $5 or above $500 an hour, or below $15,000 or above $1,000,000 a year, are treated as data errors and dropped.
Employer median is our headline: we take each employer’s own median, then the median across employers, so a company posting hundreds of openings counts once.
The plain listing median is shown alongside.
We suppress any figure built on fewer than 30 listings or 10 employers, and flag anything under 100 listings as a small sample.
Pay medians use only listings whose pay we can read as a number from a structured field; listings that give pay only in the description count toward the “states pay” shares but not toward medians.
The largest single employer accounts for 25.3% of childcare directors listings with annual pay, which is why the employer median is the headline figure.
These are advertised rates, not earnings.
They exclude bonuses, commissions and incentive pay unless an employer folds them into the posted range, and listings on a job board are not a random sample of all childcare jobs.
Figures are frozen for the Q4 2026 release and refreshed quarterly; earlier releases are not revised.
ChildcareHires, “Childcare Director Pay in Job Listings: Q4 2026 Data,” Q4 2026 data release, listings snapshot of October 15, 2026. https://www.childcarehires.com/research/data/childcare-director-pay/
More first-party data: Childcare Teacher Pay in Job Listings · Assistant Teacher Pay in Job Listings · Preschool Teacher Pay in Job Listings · Infant Teacher Pay in Job Listings · Toddler Teacher Pay in Job Listings · Pre-K Teacher Pay in Job Listings · School-Age Teacher Pay in Job Listings · Floater Teacher Pay in Job Listings · Teacher Aide Pay in Job Listings · Childcare Substitute Pay in Job Listings · Head Start Teacher Pay in Job Listings · Childcare Cook Pay in Job Listings · Assistant Director Pay in Job Listings · Childcare Pay Transparency.
All research: ChildcareHires Research.
