Early childhood staff—educators as well as program directors and owners, administrative staff, instructional experts, and cooking and cleaning staff—have long been underpaid, resulting in high staff turnover and low supply and quality of child care. In recent years, state and local wage boost initiatives that strengthen child care supply through improving compensation have proliferated. The goal of this brief is to synthesize lessons learned from several of these wage boost initiatives so that jurisdictions around the country can design their own sustainable and effective solutions.

Why This Matters

Low compensation has long been recognized as an impediment to child care supply and quality, but there is limited evidence on how states and localities might raise compensation—including the design decision points available to them and the potential ramifications of those decisions. Because states and localities have different resources and constraints, variation in the design and implementation of wage boosts provides a unique opportunity to build a body of evidence on the intended effects and unintended consequences of policy design. In turn, this body of evidence can identify policy decisions where additional research is needed while also catalyzing future innovation and promoting better outcomes.

Key Takeaways

Some of the decision points that matter most for wage boost implementation include the following:

• Considering which early childhood staff and programs are eligible to participate in a wage boost initiative (e.g., balancing goals of the initiative with funding levels)
• Determining the size of the wage boost, especially in light of funding levels and wage boost eligibility
• Establishing a structure for distributing funding to early childhood staff (e.g., supplemental payments paid directly to staff versus supplemental wages paid through paychecks)
• Mitigating unintended consequences, including tax burden, public benefits eligibility cliffs, wage competition, wage compression and unintended workforce dynamics, and administrative burden

How We Did It

To explore trade-offs and best practices in wage boost design, we draw on our experiences evaluating and advising on the development of multiple wage boost initiatives over the past several years, in both small and large roles as well as in states and localities across the country. These partnerships range from advising on policy design to conducting primary data collection and analysis of state or local administrative data.