Nationwide, Low Wages Force Many Child-Care Workers to Rely on Public Assistance

October 30, 2024 – Caring for children during their first few years is a complex and critical job: A child’s brain develops more in the first five years than at any other point in life. Yet in America, individuals engaged in this crucial role are paid less than animal caretakers and dressing room attendants.

That’s a major finding from one of two new reports on the dismal treatment of child-care workers. Together, the reports offer a distressing picture of how child-care staff are faring economically, including the troubling changes low wages have caused to the workforce.

Early childhood workers nationally earn a median wage of $13.07 per hour, resulting in poverty-level earnings for 13 percent of such educators, according to the first report, the Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024. Released earlier this month by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, the annual report also found:

43 percent of families of early educators rely on public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid.
Pay inequity exists within these low wages: Black early childhood educators earn about $8,000 less per year than their white peers. The same pay gap exists between early educators who work with infants and toddlers and those who work with preschoolers, who have more opportunities to work in school districts that pay higher wages.
Wages for early educators are rising more slowly than wages in other industries, including fast food and retail.

In part due to these conditions, the industry is losing some of its highest-educated workers, according to a second new report, by Chris M. Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs. That study compares the pay of child-care workers with that of workers in other lower-income professions, including cooks and retail workers; it finds child-care workers are the 10^th lowest-paid occupation out of around 750 in the economy. Moreover, Herbst reports, higher-educated workers are being “siphoned off” by higher-paying jobs, leading to a “bit of a death spiral” in terms of how child-care work is perceived, and contributes to the persistent low wages, he said in an interview.

You can read Herbst’s full report here, and the 2024 workforce index here.

This story about child care wages was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.