Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($37,060) to the 90th ($96,400). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 71,620 people in May 2024, 0.05% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 8,290 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 26.1% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Arkansas, whose location quotient of 1.89 says this work is 1.89 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $37,060 or less, and one in ten earns $96,400 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.6 to 1 and the annual gap is $59,340. The mean ($62,640) versus median ($56,270) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

New York posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $79,660, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare stands number 325 by employment and number 458 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Management Occupations, the group median wage is $106,980 across 38 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 47% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 10,966,830 jobs. In 18 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $56,270, 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 4,740 jobs, 6.6% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 239 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $51,870 a year, against $91,640 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,689 a month before tax, $2,164 biweekly, $1,082 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($45,310) to the 75th ($72,690) is worth $27,380 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $61,897 would sit between the median ($56,270) and the 75th percentile ($72,690), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $45,310, is $10,960 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Management Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Managers, All Other, Sales Managers, Medical and Health Services Managers, Marketing Managers, Construction Managers, Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary. The full directory is on the Careers hub.