Occupation / job
Childcare Workers
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
Childcare Workers pays $34,980 where the typical American job pays $50,020 — $15,040 a year short, or $7.23 an hour. That is a liveable wage in a cheap state and a difficult one in an expensive city, and nothing about the national figure tells you which you would be in.
518,910 people do this work. An occupation this large has a published, well-known going rate — which means less scope to be underpaid and less scope to negotiate above it.
These personal care roles suit people who are good with strangers quickly and repeatedly, since the same interpersonal skill has to be produced fresh for every client all day.
No verified preparation time is on file for Childcare Workers. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
$9,210 separates the bottom quarter at $29,360 from the top quarter at $38,570, a ratio of 1.3x. In a band that tight, moving up inside Childcare Workers pays less than moving out of it would.
The bottom quarter of Childcare Workers earns under $29,360 — $20,660 below the $50,020 national midpoint, or $14.11 an hour. A floor that low means the occupation cannot be judged on its median alone; a quarter of the people in it are somewhere else entirely.
Avoid it if you need a schedule that does not follow other people’s evenings, weekends and school terms.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 518,910 figure counts people already working as Childcare Workers, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
A 1.3x spread means the top quarter of Childcare Workers is not doing a different job from the bottom quarter, just a slightly better-paid version of the same one. Between $29,360 and $38,570 is the whole of the negotiation.
Put in money rather than ratios: $29,360 at the 25th percentile, $34,980 at the midpoint, $38,570 at the 75th. $9,210 separates the quarter of Childcare Workers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $29,360 and $38,570 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $34,980. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $3,590; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $9,210.
The midpoint sits high inside its own range: $5,620 above the $29,360 bottom quarter but only $3,590 below the $38,570 top quarter. Most of the distance in Childcare Workers is spent climbing out of the bottom, and once you are past the middle there is not much further to go.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $14.11 at the bottom quarter, $16.81 at the midpoint, $18.54 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $34,980 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Childcare Workers, the hourly figure is $34,980 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else