Childcare Teacher Retention: How to Hire for Five Years

Most schools treat childcare teacher retention as a hiring problem. It's a year-two problem.

Here's the short version. A lead teacher who stays five years isn't something you hire. It's something you operate your way into. The research is blunt about this: even inside well-funded, high-quality early childhood programs, annual staff turnover runs about 30%, and the average tenure of lead teachers and assistants is a little more than two years.¹ So five years isn't a norm you're failing to hit. It's roughly double the norm. Three things move it, and only one of them happens in an interview. Pay sets the ceiling — centers averaging under $10 an hour turn over at 23.1% a year against 7.5% at centers averaging $25 or more.² How teachers see their workplace predicts whether they stay better than anything on their résumé.¹ And somebody with authority has to be in the building on the days those conditions are actually set. Hiring gets you a teacher. Operating keeps one.

We've staffed and operated 21 Goddard Schools. This is where the job is actually won.

What is the real turnover rate in early childhood education?

Worse than most owners expect, and it isn't a local problem.

An eight-state analysis by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute tracked everyone working directly with children — teachers, program directors, and owners — and found that 44% left the workforce between 2023 and 2025. Those eight states counted roughly 205,000 early childhood educators in 2023. By 2025 the number was under 116,000.³

Pennsylvania was one of the eight.

That's the water every school in this state is swimming in. It reframes the question. You're not competing with the center down the road for teachers. You're competing with every employer that doesn't require a background check, a credential, and responsibility for other people's children.

Pay sets the ceiling. Everything else works underneath it.

This is the part owners most want to be untrue, and the data is unusually clean on it.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis looked at turnover against average center wages. The spread isn't subtle:

Roughly a third of the turnover, at the top of the wage range.² The same analysis found centers serving subsidized children turned over at 25.3% versus 15.8% elsewhere, and the wage gap tracked right alongside it — $11.52 against $15.13 an hour.² The researchers' own conclusion was that raising wages is "the most straightforward response to the problem."

We're not going to pretend that's a small ask. Payroll is the largest line in a school's budget, and tuition isn't infinitely elastic. But it does mean something practical for anyone modeling a new school: a staffing plan built on below-market pay is very likely a turnover plan. You'll probably spend the difference either way. You'll just spend it on recruiting, training, and the enrollment you quietly lose while a room is unstable.

Model the wage you actually intend to pay before you commit to the site, not after. That's the same discipline we apply to what a franchise consultant actually does at every other stage of an opening.

What actually predicts whether a teacher stays?

Once pay is in a defensible range, three things separate the teachers who stay from the ones who don't.

How they see the workplace, not how they describe themselves. In the Educare study, the staff who remained were markedly more likely to hold positive views of their work environment.¹ That's a measurable thing, and it's measurable before someone resigns. Most schools discover it in an exit interview, which is the one moment it's worth nothing.

Where you place them. The same study found retention was higher among staff working with infants and toddlers than in preschool classrooms.¹ Placement is a retention decision, not just a scheduling one. Putting a strong candidate in the room that happens to be open is how good hires become average tenures.

What they trained in. Buffett's numbers put overall educator retention at 56%. For educators holding an associate degree specifically in early childhood education, it was 70%. A CDA credential came in at 65%, and a general associate degree at 63%.³ A credential isn't a personality test, but it's evidence that someone chose this field on purpose rather than landing in it.

None of those three is discoverable from a résumé. All three are discoverable in a conversation, if the conversation is built to find them.

Hiring for year five starts in the interview

The interview most schools run is designed to answer one question: can this person do the job in September?

Hiring for year five asks a different question, and it's worth being explicit about the difference.

• Fill-the-room hiring asks about availability, certification, and experience. It's fast and it's necessary.
• Five-year hiring asks what the candidate needs from a workplace in order to still want the job in year three, and whether this school can honestly provide it.

The second one is slower and it disqualifies more people. It also disqualifies them before they cost you a year of classroom instability, a re-hire, and the parents who noticed.

One caution, because it's the trap in this whole subject: don't hire for five years and then run a school nobody wants to stay at for two. The interview can't outrun the operating conditions. If the environment is unstable, the credential doesn't save you and neither does the pay.

Why an on-site owner changes the retention math

Every lever above is an operating lever. Somebody has to actually pull them, in the building, on the days they matter.

Pennsylvania sets hard staff-to-child ratios — 1:4 for infants, 1:5 for young toddlers, 1:6 for older toddlers, and 1:10 for preschool, with maximum group sizes attached to each.⁴ Those ratios don't bend for a call-out. When a teacher is out, someone covers, and the quality of that decision is the difference between a rough morning and a resignation three weeks later.

An owner in the building sees the problem while it's still a mood. An owner reading a weekly report sees it after it has become a vacancy.

This is the same argument we make for the on-site owner model generally, and staffing is where it shows up most plainly. It's also why so many of the strongest operators we work with came out of classrooms themselves — they can tell the difference between a teacher having a hard week and a teacher deciding to leave. That path from career educator to franchise owner isn't sentimental. It's an operating advantage in exactly this situation.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good teacher retention rate for a childcare center? Judge it against roughly 30% annual turnover, which is what a well-resourced program reported even under good conditions.¹ Holding turnover meaningfully below that's a genuine achievement, not a baseline.

How long does the average preschool teacher stay? A little more than two years for lead teachers and assistants in the Educare network study.¹ Five years is roughly double that.

Does paying more actually reduce childcare staff turnover? The Minneapolis Fed data says yes, and by a large margin — 23.1% annual turnover at centers averaging under $10 an hour against 7.5% at centers averaging $25 or more.² Pay isn't the only factor, but it sets the ceiling the other factors work under.

Should I require a degree or a CDA when I hire? It correlates with staying. Educators with an ECE-specific associate degree were retained at 70% against an overall 56%.³ Treat it as one signal among several rather than a filter that shrinks an already thin applicant pool.

Does an on-site owner really affect retention? We believe it does, and it's the model we operate. We would rather say that plainly than dress it up as a statistic we can't source. What we can point to is that Goddard requires an on-site owner or on-site operator at every school, and that the daily decisions which hold a team together are made in the building.

Where this leaves you

Hiring gets you a teacher. Operating keeps one.

If you're modeling a new school, put the wage line and the coverage plan in the model before you fall in love with the site. If you're running one already, the cheapest retention work available to you this month is finding out how your teachers actually see the place — while they still work there.

Ask us for the Franchisee Success Kit, or book a free consultation and we will walk your staffing plan with you.

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This article is educational and makes no representation of financial performance or guaranteed results. It is not an offer to sell a franchise. Requirements and support obligations vary by brand — confirm specifics against the current Franchise Disclosure Document.

Sources

1. Retention and turnover of teaching staff in a high-quality early childhood network — Bryant, Yazejian, Kuhn et al., Early Childhood Research Quarterly vol. 65 (2023), summarized by the FPG Child Development Institute. https://fpg.unc.edu/news/investigating-teaching-staff-turnover-early-childhood-education ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Examining teacher turnover in early care and education — Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/examining-teacher-turnover-in-early-care-and-education ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Buffett Early Childhood Institute eight-state workforce analysis (Illinois, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee), reported by Zero2Eight. https://zero2eight.substack.com/p/teacher-turnover-in-the-early-years ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Staff-to-child ratios and maximum group sizes — 55 Pa. Code § 3270.51, Similar age level. https://www.pacodeandbulletin.gov/Display/pacode?file=%2Fsecure%2Fpacode%2Fdata%2F055%2Fchapter3270%2Fs3270.51.html ↩