Childcare Workers
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays childcare workers the most, at $47,340. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $34,785 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- The District of Columbia leads for childcare workers at $47,340 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $34,785 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$34,980
People doing it
518,910
Highest paid
$47,340
DC
Best off, really
$34,785
DC, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$24,260
Highest tenth
$46,010
Lowest, really
$21,571
AL
States with data
51
National average
$35,030
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
110.8%
DC, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $21,571 up to $34,785.
- Roughly 518,910 people hold this job nationally, earning $34,980 in the middle. A solid, ordinary-sized job.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $34,980, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- The nominal spread for childcare workers approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $21,571 to $34,785, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- 518,910 are employed nationally in childcare workers, placing it well inside the reported range without approaching the highest-headcount occupations.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for childcare workers, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Childcare Workers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $24,260 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $34,980 |
| Top tenth earn over | $46,010 |
| This salary | $34,980 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Childcare Workers
The national median for this job
$34,980around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $24,260 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $34,980 |
| Top tenth | $46,010 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Childcare Workers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $22,050 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $47,340 |
| Spread | $25,290 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $28,570 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $29,401 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC | $47,340 | $38,543 | $34,785 |
| NM | $35,840 | $30,404 | $33,638 |
| CO | $40,750 | $33,838 | $33,377 |
| WA | $41,680 | $35,670 | $32,857 |
| VT | $38,030 | $31,719 | $32,824 |
| MT | $35,120 | $29,505 | $32,695 |
| ME | $36,350 | $30,190 | $31,092 |
| MA | $40,900 | $33,318 | $30,782 |
| AK | $36,200 | $31,267 | $30,740 |
| RI | $36,940 | $30,896 | $30,466 |
| NH | $37,080 | $31,974 | $30,351 |
| MN | $35,520 | $29,639 | $30,115 |
| ND | $30,290 | $26,518 | $29,939 |
| CA | $40,020 | $33,600 | $29,845 |
| IL | $35,830 | $29,341 | $29,680 |
| AZ | $35,100 | $29,908 | $29,581 |
| WI | $32,460 | $27,515 | $29,555 |
| CT | $36,660 | $30,597 | $29,508 |
| OR | $38,650 | $30,404 | $29,033 |
| NE | $30,740 | $26,155 | $28,940 |
| MO | $30,790 | $26,410 | $28,781 |
| NY | $37,590 | $30,951 | $28,758 |
| FL | $34,210 | $29,668 | $28,678 |
| MD | $36,030 | $29,782 | $28,646 |
| NJ | $36,390 | $30,863 | $28,345 |
| VA | $34,330 | $28,551 | $28,339 |
| AR | $28,450 | $24,443 | $28,255 |
| OH | $29,680 | $25,928 | $28,240 |
| TN | $29,660 | $26,012 | $28,116 |
| ID | $30,160 | $25,668 | $28,076 |
| HI | $37,030 | $30,488 | $28,071 |
| SD | $27,940 | $24,619 | $27,946 |
| DE | $33,210 | $27,588 | $27,796 |
| IN | $30,180 | $25,569 | $27,737 |
| IA | $28,420 | $24,546 | $27,652 |
| MI | $30,970 | $25,999 | $27,604 |
| SC | $29,650 | $25,712 | $27,595 |
| UT | $31,630 | $26,187 | $27,565 |
| WY | $28,250 | $24,874 | $27,380 |
| KY | $28,920 | $24,523 | $27,106 |
| KS | $29,240 | $24,331 | $27,045 |
| NV | $29,740 | $26,076 | $26,888 |
| OK | $27,730 | $23,698 | $26,843 |
| NC | $29,140 | $24,940 | $26,493 |
| WV | $27,710 | $23,774 | $26,483 |
| PA | $30,140 | $25,472 | $26,125 |
| TX | $28,570 | $25,136 | $25,867 |
| GA | $28,020 | $23,885 | $24,700 |
| LA | $22,900 | $20,167 | $22,828 |
| MS | $22,050 | $18,978 | $21,741 |
| AL | $22,720 | $19,407 | $21,571 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for childcare workers, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $34,980 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for childcare workers assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $38,543.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for childcare workers. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Alabama, on $21,571.
- All wage figures for childcare workers are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $34,980. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for childcare workers assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $38,543, in the District of Columbia. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for childcare workers rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Alabama anchors the distribution at $21,571. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.