How Much Can You Make with a Bachelor’s in Early Childhood Education Degree?

Secondary Education

Early Childhood Education jobs can be preschool teachers, elementary teachers in public or private schools, directors, special education teachers, or childcare managers to name some. Here at Best Education Degrees, we want to answer this important question thoroughly.

Below you’ll find information about average salaries, salary ranges, and location specific wages. Since one can work in many different areas and jobs in Early Childhood Education gathered statistics from Payscale and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to help you find the best school for you.

Preschool Teachers

A preschool teacher must engage our nation’s little ones with activities that are fun, hands-on, not too challenging but still have educational merit; activities might include coloring, finger painting, putting on short plays, singing songs, and reading out loud to them. A particular character is required to be a good preschool teacher: patience and passion. Working with small children is exhausting. They have endless energy, little common sense, loud voices, and bad manners, which means you have to be able to manage them, command them, lovingly correct them, placate them, solve disputes between inherently unreasonable children, and more. Preschool teachers work halfdays for ten months.

Preschool teachers average $28,943 per year, or $12.96 an hour. The salary range is $19,219 – $38,470.

Pay depends greatly on who you work for and where you work. The top five highest salaries by state (all early childhood jobs combined) are:

New York -$46,173
California-$54,269
Texas-$41,166
Florida-$40,573
Illinois-$44,817

Elementary School Teachers

Elementary teachers are like mini liberal arts educators. They do not specialize a subject; rather they teach all subjects at a basic level: reading comprehension, spelling, writing, math, science, and history. Elementary teachers have to be very patient, organized, and energetic. Teaching for a full-day for ten months requires activities planned and organized, with all the many materials prepared as well, lessons to be quick and effective, the ability to manage up to 30 kids, work with and manage instructional assistants, communicate with families, evaluate progress, and teach young children all the subjects.

The average salary for Elementary teachers is $43,591, though the BLS states that Kindergarten and Elementary School Teachers average $55,490.

See above for the top five highest paying states for Early Childhood Education.

Other potential jobs available in early childhood education are individual and family services,

Individual and family services, which has an average salary of $31,060
Religious, grantmaking, civic, professional, and similar organizations with an average salary of $29,950
Child day care services with an average salary of $26,520

Those seeking leadership positions, which gained with Bachelor’s in Early Childhood degrees with concentrations such as Ferris State University’s Early Childhood Management, which we ranked #28 in our Top 35 Best Bachelor’s in Early Childhood Education, may be a way to make more money.

For example, a Preschool Directors makes a salary in the range of $25,072 – $57,700 a year, with an average of $40,000. A Childcare Director makes about the same – an average of $39,000. An Early Childhood Special Education teacher averages $45,000 a year. Lastly, an Executive Director position averages over $60,000 a year, with a lot of variation depending on the job and location.