Early educators are engaged in incredibly difficult and complex work that has been recognized as essential to children’s learning and development, supportive for families, and foundational to the economy.

Nonetheless, no states paid early educators a living wage in 2022. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states used time-limited federal relief funding to bolster supports for the workforce. As federal relief funds expire, there is a greater need to secure permanent public investment and adopt state policies that appropriately prepare, support, and compensate the early education workforce.

Early Childhood Workforce Policy Indicators

In each of the five policy areas, the Early Childhood Workforce Index assesses states based on measurable policy indicators that represent state-level opportunities to enhance the lives of the many children and adults affected by ECE employment conditions.

To summarize overall state action in each policy area, states are assigned to one of three tiers, based on their performance on the indicators:

Stalled: The state is making limited or no progress;
Edging Forward: The state is making partial progress; or
Making Headway: The state is taking action and advancing promising policies.

Notes

*Our workforce estimate includes child care workers in home- and center-based settings, nannies, self-employed child care workers, preschool teachers, teaching assistants, and administrators/directors. In order to provide an inclusive summary of the ECE workforce as a whole, we use the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS), which can support both national and state-level analysis to pool all individuals covered by the relevant occupation-industry pairings. For more information visit Appendix 1: Data Sources & Methodology.

**This edition of the Early Childhood Workforce Index uses data from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS)—a departure from previous editions, which reported data from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS). The most recent year for which detailed, state-by-state data are available from the ACS is 2022. Using the ACS is an intentional change to provide more inclusive wage estimates for the ECE workforce by using a data source that includes home-based providers. More recent data from OEWS 2023 are available, but this data source excludes self-employed workers like family child care providers. The OEWS also does not allow us to study the ECE workforce as a whole, since we are unable to parse or combine categories of workers. For instance, the national BLS OEWS estimates for median wages in 2023 were $14.60 for child care workers, $17.85 for preschool teachers, and $26.10 for directors or administrators.