The labor market case for early childhood education

Summary: Child Care Pay Still Lags Despite Decades of Policy Change

by Katharine Sadowski | August 4, 2026

Using nationally representative Current Population Survey data from 1990 through 2025, the Brookings Institute article compares the economic position of school-, center-, and home-based child-care workers with that of women overall and other low-wage workers.

Child care workers are more educated and better paid than in the early 1990s, but their relative economic position has barely improved. After adjusting for inflation, their annual earnings gap with women overall grew from about $20,000 in 1990–1995 to $28,000 in 2020–2025. They also earned roughly $8,000 less annually than other low-wage workers, even though 66% had at least some college education, compared with 52% of those workers.

Home-based care recorded the largest real wage gain, with median hourly wages rising by about $9 more than doubling. Yet its share of the workforce fell from nearly one in four workers in the early 1990s to about one in seven today. Center-based pay also rose, while school-based jobs, the best paid and most educated, improved only modestly.

Sadowski attributes the overall wage gains mainly to a more credentialed workforce, not movement into better-paying types of care. Educators gained education and credentials, but the labor market did not reward that professionalization enough to close the gap with comparable workers.

Brookings describes the compensation problem as structural, not temporary. Professionalization requirements, public pre-K expansion, higher wage floors, and pandemic aid have not produced lasting improvements in relative pay. Sustained public financing is needed to support higher wages, stable employment, and stronger benefits without making care unaffordable for families.

Read the full article:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-labor-market-case-for-early-childhood-education/

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