Preschool teachers
Official title Preschool Teachers, Except Special Education (SOC 25-2011)
Also called Pre-k teacher, Early childhood educator, ECE teacher, Head start teacher, Daycare teacher
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 478,780 US preschool teachers, with median pay of $38,140 a year. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 5,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for preschool teachers: NYC universal pre-K + Brightwheel, 2014 to 2022.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to grow 4.5% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 31.1% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.0074 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Preschool teachers: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2011
Future History. "Preschool teachers: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2011.
@misc{futurehistory_25_2011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Preschool teachers: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $37,162 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
Margarethe Meyer Schurz opens the first kindergarten in the United States in Watertown, Wisconsin, conducting Friedrich Froebel's method in German for children of the immigrant community. Four years later, Elizabeth Peabody opens the first English-language kindergarten in Boston (1860). In 1873, Susan Blow opens the first publicly funded kindergarten in St. Louis, establishing that preschool education is a legitimate public responsibility. By 1880 over 400 kindergartens operate in the US. The kindergartner, typically a woman trained in a specialized normal school or training institute, is a distinct professional from the common school teacher: she works with younger children, uses different materials and methods, and operates in a more explicitly developmental framework.
The National Association for Nursery Education is founded: the organization that will later become NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children). Its founding mission: professionalize the emerging nursery school field by establishing training standards, sharing research, and distinguishing developmental early childhood education from custodial care. The nursery school movement of the 1910s-1920s (led by educators at Bank Street College [Lucy Sprague Mitchell's Bureau of Educational Experiments, founded 1916] and the Ruggles Street Nursery School in Boston) had established that children ages 2-4 benefited from structured educational environments, not just daycare. NAEYC becomes the primary professional association for preschool teachers and eventually develops the accreditation system that states use as a quality benchmark.
President Johnson launches Head Start in the summer of 1965: the first publicly funded preschool program in the United States at national scale. At launch, only 10% of American children were enrolled in any preschool program. Head Start deliberately hires low-income parents from the communities it serves as teachers, aides, and family advocates, creating the first large-scale paid preschool teacher workforce drawn from outside the middle-class educated pipeline. The program's comprehensive model (education, nutrition, health, and family engagement) establishes what professionalized preschool teaching looks like. By 2017, Head Start and Early Head Start combined serve approximately 1 million children annually.
Georgia Governor Zell Miller signs legislation establishing Georgia's universal pre-kindergarten program in 1995: the first universal pre-K program in US history, open to all four-year-olds regardless of family income, funded by state lottery revenue. Within a few years, Georgia's program serves more than 80,000 children annually through both public school and community-based settings. Oklahoma follows with a universal pre-K program in 1998, achieving some of the highest participation rates in the country. These two state programs become the model that NIEER tracks, promotes, and that dozens of other states attempt to emulate over the following two decades. The state Pre-K expansion is the primary driver of preschool teacher employment growth from 1995 onward.
Mayor Bill De Blasio launches NYC's universal pre-K program: the largest expansion of public preschool in US history outside of a federal program. Within two years, over 68,000 four-year-olds are enrolled in NYC pre-K programs, requiring the rapid hiring of thousands of preschool teachers. NYC's program is distinctive in paying community-based organization (CBO) pre-K teachers wages closer to public school salaries, beginning to close the dramatic wage gap between preschool and elementary teachers in that city. By 2019 NYC pre-K enrollment exceeds 70,000 children. The NYC model demonstrates that rapid, high-quality, universal pre-K expansion is achievable in a major city within a few years when adequate public funding is committed.
COVID-19 forces the closure of virtually all preschool programs in March-April 2020. The impact on the preschool teacher workforce is severe: preschool children (ages 3-5) cannot meaningfully participate in remote learning, even more so than kindergartners, because preschool is primarily developmental and relational rather than academic. Approximately 16,000 childcare providers permanently closed during the pandemic, permanently reducing the supply of preschool infrastructure. ARP Act stabilization funds ($24 billion, 2021) prevent further closures and support partial recovery. By 2023 state pre-K enrollment had recovered, with the NIEER 2023 yearbook noting that 3- and 4-year-old enrollment in state programs reached all-time highs in 2022-23, though overall enrollment remained below pre-COVID levels due to supply-side losses.
BLS National Employment Matrix projects +4.1% employment growth for Preschool Teachers 2024-2034, above average for all occupations, driven by continued state Pre-K expansion. The median annual wage is $37,120 (May 2024), compared to $62,340 for elementary school teachers. The CSCCE documents that 41% of preschool teacher families use at least one public safety net program (Medicaid, EITC, SNAP), reflecting the structural wage gap between preschool and K-12 teaching despite similar educational requirements. States with state-funded pre-K programs increasingly require bachelor's degrees and pay public school wage scales to teachers placed in those settings, slowly narrowing the gap, but the majority of preschool teachers work in privately funded settings where the wage floor is set by the market, not by union contracts or legislative schedules.
Will AI replace preschool teachers? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for preschool teachers
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you hereManage program administration tasks (tracking attendance, generating tuition invoices, processing enrollment paperwork, and scheduling staff-to-child ratios) using Procare Solutions' AI-assisted scheduling and Brightwheel's billing and enrollment automation, freeing center directors and lead teachers from the administrative back-office work that previously consumed hours per week.
Manage program administration tasks (tracking attendance, generating tuition invoices, processing enrollment paperwork, and scheduling staff-to-child ratios) using Procare Solutions' AI-assisted scheduling and Brightwheel's billing and enrollment automation, freeing center directors and lead teachers from the administrative back-office work that previously consumed hours per week.[9],[14]
Brightwheel and Procare now automate most of the recurring administrative tasks (attendance check-in via QR code, automated tuition billing, enrollment packet digitization, subsidy billing to Child Care and Development Fund programs) that previously required dedicated administrative staff or pulled lead teachers away from children. In small family child care homes and center-based programs with no administrator, this automation is the difference between a financially viable program and one that closes. Master both platforms: use Brightwheel for family-facing automation (enrollment, billing, daily reports, messaging) and Procare for back-office center management (staff scheduling, licensing compliance documentation, ratio tracking). The AI handles the paperwork; your professional value is in the human-facing program quality.
AI is sitting alongside you hereSend daily parent/guardian communication (activity summaries, meal reports, nap logs, mood notes, and milestone observations) using Brightwheel's AI-assisted daily report generator or HiMama/Lillio's automated activity logging to produce a professional parent-facing update from teacher check-ins, replacing the 20-30 minutes of manual daily report writing that previously ate into naptime planning time.
Send daily parent/guardian communication (activity summaries, meal reports, nap logs, mood notes, and milestone observations) using Brightwheel's AI-assisted daily report generator or HiMama/Lillio's automated activity logging to produce a professional parent-facing update from teacher check-ins, replacing the 20-30 minutes of manual daily report writing that previously ate into naptime planning time.[9],[10]
Brightwheel and HiMama/Lillio automate the structural skeleton of the daily report (meals, nap times, diaper changes, activity check-ins) in real time: the teacher taps a few buttons during the activity rather than reconstructing the day from memory at 5pm. The professional value you add is the one specific developmental observation per child per week ("Mateo initiated a three-turn conversation with Aisha today about their block tower — that's new for him") that transforms a form report into a family partnership touchpoint. That specificity is only available to you, and in Head Start and NAEYC-accredited programs it is also the documentation that drives individualized planning. Reserve the recovered writing time for this observation-to-documentation practice.
AI is sitting alongside you herePlan and document weekly curriculum, writing lesson plans aligned to state early learning standards or the Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework, using MagicSchool AI to generate activity idea lists and material-preparation checklists as starting scaffolds, then adapting all AI output for the developmental range, interests, and cultural contexts of the specific children in the classroom.
Plan and document weekly curriculum, writing lesson plans aligned to state early learning standards or the Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework, using MagicSchool AI to generate activity idea lists and material-preparation checklists as starting scaffolds, then adapting all AI output for the developmental range, interests, and cultural contexts of the specific children in the classroom.[15],[6]
MagicSchool AI generates NAEYC-aligned preschool activity frameworks, sensory bin ideas, and lesson plan outlines from a theme and age group in minutes, eliminating the Sunday-evening curriculum-planning marathon that ECE teachers on tight hourly schedules cannot afford. The irreplaceable professional act is the adaptation: knowing that a generic "community helpers" theme needs to include the specific community helpers the children in your multilingual Head Start classroom actually encounter, and that the dramatic play props need to reflect the family structures present in your group. Use the AI scaffold to save planning time; invest the recovered time in observing the children's current interests and developmental edges so your curriculum actually responds to the group in front of you.
Where preschool teachers go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare
- US median pay
- $59,300 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -3.1%
- Training and Development Specialists
- US median pay
- $69,280 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +10.8%
- Child, Family, and School Social Workers
- US median pay
- $59,550 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +4.4%
What each move takes
Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare
Preschool teachers are the primary pipeline for ECE program director and childcare administrator roles: the most direct career advancement path in the field. Center directors in 2025-2026 must navigate NAEYC accreditation processes, Teaching Strategies GOLD program-level data analysis, Brightwheel and Procare platform administration, state licensing compliance, and the increasingly complex AI-tool vetting question (which platforms are developmentally appropriate for ages 3-5, COPPA-compliant, and family-data-safe?). Lead teachers who have deep experience with GOLD checkpoint documentation, family partnership practices, Head Start performance standards, and the ECE administrative platform stack are the strongest candidates for director roles. Pay increases meaningfully at the director level, though the role adds business-management complexity.
- · Business administration for childcare: operating budgets, CCDF subsidy billing, tuition-setting, payroll management, and program financial sustainability
- · Licensing and accreditation: state child care licensing standards, NAEYC accreditation criteria and self-study process, Head Start monitoring requirements
- · Staff supervision and coaching: formal observation-and-feedback cycles, ECE coaching frameworks (Practice-Based Coaching, CLASS observation), staff evaluation and retention
- · ECE platform administration: Brightwheel and Procare backend configuration, enrollment management, parent communication at program scale, GOLD program-level data analysis
- · Director credential or CDA renewal: most states require a director credential, Child Development Associate (CDA) credential renewal, or an associate/bachelor's degree in ECE or early childhood administration
How has the work of preschool teachers changed since 1837?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Froebel gifts: the first purpose-built early childhood curriculum materials
Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten method, which he developed at Bad Blankenburg, Germany in 1837, was built around a sequence of manipulative objects he called 'gifts': soft colored balls for infants, wooden spheres and cubes for toddlers, sets of small building blocks in progressively complex geometries for children ages 2-5. These were not toys in the casual sense; they were pedagogical instruments, each gift designed to reveal a specific mathematical or spatial relationship through the child's own hands. Froebel also developed 'occupations' (weaving, folding, cutting, drawing, modeling with clay) as activities that gave form to the concepts the gifts introduced. The Froebel system was the first time anyone had designed materials specifically for how young children learn, as opposed to miniature versions of adult educational tools. When Margarethe Meyer Schurz and Elizabeth Peabody introduced the kindergarten to the United States in the 1850s-1860s, the Froebel gifts and occupations came with it. Teacher-training institutes taught prospective kindergartners to use them correctly. The materials shaped what it meant to teach preschool for the next half-century.
Effect on the workThe Froebel system required trained teachers, not anyone who could read aloud, but someone who understood the developmental sequence the gifts were designed to build through. This created the first demand for specialized preschool teacher training, establishing that preschool teaching was a distinct skill from elementary teaching, and setting up a permanent tension between those who believed it required professional credentials and those who believed any caring adult could do it.
Montessori method and progressive child development science
Maria Montessori opened her first Casa dei Bambini (Children's House) in a Rome tenement in January 1907. The Montessori method (child-directed activity within a carefully prepared environment stocked with self-correcting sensory materials, learning to read through movable alphabet letters, learning arithmetic through golden bead chains that made the decimal system tangible) reached the United States as a sensation by 1912 and was embraced by progressive educators across the country. Simultaneously, the academic discipline of child development was being established: G. Stanley Hall at Clark University conducting the first systematic studies of child psychology in the 1880s-1890s. Lucy Sprague Mitchell's Bureau of Educational Experiments (1916, forerunner of Bank Street College) built curriculum around children's direct exploration of their physical and social environment. The tools of this era were still largely handcraft and manipulative materials, but the pedagogy behind them had become a serious applied science.
Effect on the workProgressive child development science raised the bar for what a competent preschool teacher needed to know. By mid-century, the NAEYC (founded 1926 as the National Association for Nursery Education) was actively working to professionalize the field by establishing training standards, conference networks, and eventually accreditation criteria that distinguished high-quality preschool programs from mere custodial care.
WPA Emergency Nursery Schools: federal curriculum and public infrastructure at scale
The Works Progress Administration launched Emergency Nursery Schools in 1933 as New Deal relief, primarily to employ unemployed teachers, but created, for the first time, federally operated preschool programs at national scale. By the end of 1935, over 1,900 WPA nursery schools were operating nationally, serving 76,000 children and employing more than 6,600 workers. The WPA school curriculum drew on progressive child development principles: structured play, health screenings, nutritious meals (hot lunches for children who often arrived hungry), and developmental observation. The Lanham Act wartime centers (1942-46) followed a similar model. These programs constituted the first proof that publicly funded, structured preschool education was operationally achievable at scale in the United States: a demonstration that Head Start would draw on twenty years later.
Head Start: the first federal preschool curriculum framework at national scale
Head Start, launched in summer 1965 by the Johnson administration, enrolled 500,000 children in 2,500 communities in its first eight weeks. It was designed as a comprehensive intervention: structured preschool education, health screenings, nutrition, family engagement, and parent employment as teachers and aides. The program's curriculum framework (built on developmental science from Urie Bronfenbrenner, Jerome Bruner, and the child development researchers who advised the program's design) established what a professionalized preschool teacher's day looked like: circle time with songs and books, small-group activities with manipulative materials, outdoor play with structured but child-led exploration, and family conferences that treated parents as partners rather than passive recipients. Head Start's 1975 Performance Standards were the first federal quality benchmarks for preschool teaching. By the 1980s Head Start served hundreds of thousands of children annually. The tools were essentially unchanged (blocks, books, art materials, sensory tables) but the professional framework around them had become federally mandated.
State Pre-K expansion + NAEYC accreditation: professionalizing through credentials
The 1990s-2000s were the decade when preschool teaching professionalized through policy. Georgia launched the first universal pre-K program in the United States in 1995, funded by state lottery revenue, open to all four-year-olds regardless of income. Oklahoma followed in 1998 with a universal pre-K program that achieved some of the highest participation rates in the country. By 2010, many states had state-funded pre-K programs of some kind. The policy shift brought a credential requirement: states with quality-tiered pre-K programs began requiring associate or bachelor's degrees in early childhood education, aligning preschool teachers with K-12 credentialing norms. NAEYC's accreditation system gave programs a quality benchmark to aspire to. The tools remained developmentally appropriate hands-on materials: the 'play-based learning' framework that developmental science had validated for decades. But by 2010 a preschool teacher in a state-funded program was far more likely to hold a formal credential, follow a documented curriculum, and maintain assessment records than her equivalent from 1980.
NYC universal pre-K + Brightwheel: digital parent communication and center management
In 2014, Mayor Bill De Blasio launched NYC's universal pre-K program: the largest expansion of public preschool in US history outside of a federal program. Within two years, tens of thousands of four-year-olds were enrolled in NYC pre-K, requiring the rapid hiring of thousands of preschool teachers. NYC's program brought public school wages and benefits to pre-K teachers placed in community-based organizations, beginning to close the wage gap between preschool and elementary teachers in that city. Simultaneously, digital tools like Brightwheel (founded 2014) began transforming the administrative layer of preschool teaching: parent communication that had happened through paper notes in backpacks now flowed through a smartphone app with real-time photos, activity logs, and messaging. Assessment platforms like DRDP (Desired Results Developmental Profile) moved developmental screening from paper checklists to digital dashboards. None of this changed the fundamental developmental work: a circle time requires a teacher and a group of four-year-olds, and no app mediates that relationship. But it reduced the daily administrative burden of written parent reports per teacher.
AI lesson-planning tools + AAP screen-time guidelines as a hard constraint
ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. The AI tools that followed (MagicSchool AI, Diffit, Khanmigo, curriculum-planning assistants) have found a use in preschool teaching that is entirely on the teacher's side of the classroom: lesson plan generation, parent-communication drafts, developmental goal language for progress reports, IEP-adjacent documentation. A Gallup–Walton Family Foundation survey (2025) found that teachers using AI tools at least weekly save several hours per week across all grades. A preschool classroom is not a Chromebook classroom. The children are not independently using apps or interacting with AI in any instructionally meaningful way. The AI tools assist the teacher's preparation; they do not enter the room. None of that maps onto current AI capabilities.
Effect on the workAI tools save administrative hours for preschool teachers who adopt them, but the demand floor for preschool teachers is not set by administrative efficiency: it is set by state pre-K mandates, child-to-teacher ratios fixed in state law, Head Start Performance Standards, and parent demand. BLS projects +4.1% growth 2024-34, driven entirely by continued state pre-K expansion and not moderated by AI substitution.
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Browse all rolesPreschool Teachers, Except Special Education employment and pay by year
In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
Australia (ANZSCO 2411)
- Employment, 2025
- 76,900, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 2411 Early Childhood (Pre-primary School) Teachers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
- Median pay, 2025
- A$99,112, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,906 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 5,000 | n/a | Est., Kindergarten in the United States Researched context | Report |
| 1935 | 25,000 | n/a | Est., Living New Deal Researched context | Report |
| 1965 | 45,000 | $3,500 | Est., Head Start (program) Researched context | Report |
| 1990 | 250,000 | $13,500 | Est., NCES Digest of Education Statistics (employment) Researched contextEst., Center for the Study of Child Care… (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 357,220 | n/a | BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic | Report |
| 2003 | 368,870 | $19,820 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 354,800 | $20,980 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 348,690 | $21,990 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 361,600 | $22,680 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 380,930 | $23,130 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 392,170 | $23,870 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 389,660 | $24,540 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 369,380 | $25,700 | BLS OEWS (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2010 (pay) Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 349,430 | $26,620 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 340,350 | $27,130 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 352,730 | $27,570 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 352,420 | $28,120 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 370,190 | $28,570 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 385,550 | $28,790 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 409,740 | $28,990 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 424,520 | $29,780 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 431,350 | $30,520 | BLS OEWS 2019 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2019 (pay) Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 370,940 | $31,930 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 391,670 | $30,210 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 415,360 | $35,330 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 430,240 | $37,130 | BLS OEWS May 2023 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2023 (pay) Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 445,080 | $37,120 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 478,780 | $38,140 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |
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