ChildcareHires data release · Q4 2026

What Childcare Centers Pay School-Age Teachers: Q4 2026 Job Listing Data

Childcare centers and preschools hiring school-age teachers on ChildcareHires post a median of $17.50 an hour, across 99 employers and 356 listings that state hourly pay (October 15, 2026).

The middle half of those listings offer $16.00 to $18.50.

This is advertised pay, not earnings: for what school-age teachers take home, see our school-age teacher salary guide.

$17.50/h
Median posted pay, by employer
99 employers
$16.50/h
Median posted pay, by listing
356 listings
$16.00–$18.50
Middle 50% of listings
25th–75th percentile
73%
of school-age teacher listings state pay
930 open listings
Distribution

How Posted School-Age Teacher Pay Is Spread

Listings per pay band.

The highlighted band holds the employer median of $17.50/h.

0127253$10–$15: 38 listings$10$15–$20: 253 listings$15$20–$25: 50 listings$20$25–$30: 5 listings$25$30–$35: 10 listings$30
356 listings for school-age teachers with hourly pay, ChildcareHires, October 15, 2026. The top and bottom 2% are folded into the end bands.
Comparison

School-Age Teacher Pay Next to Other Childcare Roles

Employer median of posted hourly pay for each role with at least 30 listings and 10 employers stating it.

ChildcareHires listings, October 15, 2026.
Breakdown

By State

States with at least 30 listings and 10 employers stating hourly pay.

Other states are too thin to report on their own.

StateEmployer medianListing medianListingsEmployers
Maryland$19.00/h$19.50/h3213
New York$19.00/h$17.00/h9810
Texas$14.50/h$14.50/h3418
Context

Posted Pay vs. Salary Estimates

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 school-age teacher 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.

Methodology

How These Figures Are Calculated

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 45.2% of school-age teachers listings with hourly 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.