Some King County child care workers to get pay boost in pilot program

King County will supplement the wages of some early childhood educators and child care providers up to about $8,300 annually through 2027.

Many advocates argue that child care’s twin challenges — low wages for many providers and high costs for families — pose a fundamental math problem that requires more public dollars to solve.

King County’s pilot program will examine what happens when the government supplements provider pay.

“We get that this isn’t going to be a quick fix,” said Rokea Jones, child care strategy lead for Best Starts for Kids at the county. The county is using the pilot to study the benefits of government investment “to support long-term systemic change,” she said.

County officials estimate 1,400 workers will be able to receive the wage bump. 

Participating child care workers who work 25 or more hours per week are slated to receive four $2,080 payments a year from King County’s pilot program, amounting to a $4-per-hour wage increase for someone working 40 hours a week. Workers working 10 to 24 hours per week will receive quarterly payments of $1,040. 

The county will pay for it using $25 million raised from its second Best Starts for Kids levy, which voters approved in 2021. The county also offers subsidies for King County families to pay for child care under the Best Starts for Kids initiative.

“This investment in the child care workforce presents a vital opportunity to support a skilled and dedicated provider network,” said County Executive Dow Constantine. He called the pilot program “a step toward universal child care — ensuring all families have access while providers, predominantly women of color, earn the thriving wages they deserve.”

The application for King County’s program closes on March 7. The first quarterly payments would happen this spring, and the program is slated to run through 2027. The county expects participants will receive 12 quarterly payments.

A facility must be licensed through the state’s Department of Children, Youth and Families to qualify for the pilot program. But a provider doesn’t have to accept subsidies under the county’s Best Starts for Kids initiative to participate.

Facilities will apply and be chosen through a lottery system. The slots will be divided geographically by council district and then again among three types of providers: child care centers, in-home care providers, and providers who care for school-age children.

Slots will be assigned to facilities based on the number of workers they report to the county. Then, each worker at a facility that qualifies can decide whether to participate in the program.

The boost comes to an industry with well-known challenges on both sides of the ledger.

Families in Washington and across the country struggle to afford high child care costs. Unless they qualify for a government subsidy to cover some or all of the price, they must pay tuition directly to a child care provider. 

Providers often operate on thin margins. The majority of costs come from personnel. These providers also have smaller student-teacher ratios than typical K-12 classrooms.

Early educators typically earn lower wages and face higher poverty rates than people who teach children in kindergarten and older. 

King County child care lead teachers earn about $20 per hour on average, while lead teachers in the state make $17 per hour. According to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, 45% of early childhood educator households in Washington participated in at least one public safety net program as of 2022.

Turnover is high among child care workers. A 2024 national study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that the turnover rate for child care workers in 2022 was 65% higher than that of a typical worker. However, turnover for preschool and kindergarten teachers was similar to that of a worker in a typical job.

Employee turnover costs money for child care providers and can mean less continuity for children and families.

Recent state reports say turnover in Washington’s child care industry is 43%. A county spokesperson said they do not have more recent county-specific retention data but will collect it through the pilot program.

Measuring effects

The county is working with the Urban Institute and Cardea Services, a national nonprofit, to study the effects of the extra money.

Evaluators will survey both those who don’t get the wage boost and those who do to examine a range of factors, including their satisfaction and sense of personal accomplishment at work, their financial health and financial stress, their perceived physical health and sleep quality, their “sense of thriving,” and their depression and perceived stress. The goal is to better understand how to support child care workers holistically. 

Kalayaan Domingo, program manager for the wage boost pilot, says low wages contribute to providers’ stress, which can carry over into the classroom.

“They’re still having to make really hard decisions based upon their ability to support themselves and their families, and that stress plays a role on their own health as well as their ability to manage and to show up with the children that they’re caring for,” Domingo said. “So the health and the well-being of the workforce is also really important to learn from, because we know that has direct ties to the experiences of the children and families.”

Programs elsewhere

King County’s pilot program comes as other states and localities have tried out programs to boost pay.

In 2022, as families and providers reeled from the fallout of the COVID pandemic, Seattle and King County offered one-time retention payments of about $400 to $500 for 12,000 local child care workers.

The state has worked to boost wages for providers in government-subsidized programs. In 2021, state lawmakers voted to increase rates paid to providers accepting the Working Connections child care subsidy and providers of the state’s free preschool program, the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program.

Washington, D.C., has an initiative similar to King County’s pilot program called the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund. It is meant to supplement early child care providers’ wages. 

Researchers at the University of Virginia found that early educators selected by a lottery to get a $1,500 wage boost in that state over an eight-month period were 11 percentage points less likely to leave their workplace after eight months compared to those who did not get the money.

King County officials say their program differs from others in that it will be available to most workers at a child care facility that enrolls in it, including cooks and administrative workers, not just lead and assistant teachers.