Childcare Workers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Childcare Workers offer sit among all 520,180 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

With 520,180 jobs nationally, Childcare Workers make up 0.34% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 47,190 of those jobs, the top three states hold 26.0%, and the deepest concentration sits in North Dakota (location quotient 2.71, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $22,900 or less, and one in ten earns $44,560 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.9 to 1 and the annual gap is $21,660. The mean ($33,140) versus median ($32,050) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 47,190 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $45,400. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Childcare Workers stands number 68 by employment and number 818 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Personal Care and Service Occupations, the group median wage is $37,320 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 14% less than its group median, and it supplies 16.5% of the group's 3,159,920 jobs. In 20 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $32,050, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 46,800 jobs, 9.0% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $22,660 a year, against $51,310 in North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota, FL. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Childcare Workers paycheck, gross, is $1,233 every two weeks on an annual $32,050, which is $2,671 a month and $616 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($28,000) to the 75th ($36,960) is worth $8,960 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $35,255 would sit between the median ($32,050) and the 75th percentile ($36,960), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $28,000, is $4,050 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Personal Care and Service Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Amusement and Recreation Attendants, Recreation Workers, Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors, Hairdressers, Hairstylists, and Cosmetologists, Animal Caretakers, Manicurists and Pedicurists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.