How much do Early Childhood Educators earn? Everyone knows that their wages are low – too low – but it’s hard to find a reliable source of data to make wage comparisons.
One very interesting data source is a Government of Canada web site called Job Bank (www.jobbank.gc.ca). It’s a web site designed to help people find jobs and plan their careers by providing information. And it has a lot of data on many different occupations in many different geographic locations in Canada.
The data on Early Childhood Educators comes from the Labour Force Survey, a monthly survey conducted by Statistics Canada that produces well-known updates of unemployment rates in Canada, but also collects detailed information about wages and occupations. Each month there are about 54,000 households that respond to the survey about members of their household.
Early Childhood Educators are part of an occupation called Early Childhood Educators and Assistants. You might know it as occupation 4214 in the National Occupational Code. However, there is a new revision of this coding system and in future Early Childhood Educators and Assistants will be known as NOC 42202.
The chart below shows the latest data available for the wages of Early Childhood Educators and Assistants from the Job Bank web site. We get information on the average hourly wage rate (grey line), the “low wage” level (blue line; this is the 10th percentile of the wage distribution), and the “high wage” (orange line; this is the 90th percentile of the wage distribution). The exact number for the average wage is shown as a set of data labels on the chart.
The data seems very precise and useful. It tells us that the average wage across Canada is $20.88 per hour. However, hourly wages range from about $15 an hour to about $26.50 per hour when we look at the range from the 10th percentile to the 90th percentile. We can also see that some jurisdictions have lower wages (the Atlantic Provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta) compared to other jurisdictions. We could download similar data from other years and see how wages have changed over time.
However, the precision of this data is somewhat illusory. We are, perhaps, interested in finding out the hourly wages of program staff with certificate, diploma or university qualifications (early childhood educators) separately from the hourly wages of early childhood educator assistants who don’t have this level of qualifications. This data source does not allow us to do this; both educators and educator assistants are grouped together in the same occupation. Similarly, we can’t get data separately on supervisors and directors as opposed to ECEs that are exclusively employed in direct contact with children.
There’s another problem as well. We might well be interested only in program staff working in licensed child care centres. However, this occupation (NOC 42202) includes early childhood educators that work in kindergartens and other early childhood services as well as those in licensed centres.[1] Elementary School Teachers’ Aides are in a different occupation, as are family home care providers, but still NOC 42202 does not give us a wage for licensed child care centre employees only.
A major alternative source of data is available for Ontario. This comes from a census survey of all licensed child care providers in the province that is conducted annually by the Ministry of Education. The last data that has been released on wages is from 2019 (!) https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontarios-early-years-and-child-care-annual-report-2020.
It is likely that the Ministry of Education has data from 2022, but this has not yet been published. Here is the data from the 2019 Ontario survey.
This Ontario wage data is collected from centres, so reflects only the wages that are paid to staff in licensed child care centres. Centre directors are asked to report how many staff with different qualification levels have hourly wages in a number of different ranges. Wages for early childhood educators with an RECE are reported separately from wages for staff in an RECE position but who needed a director’s approval because of lack of full qualification. Wages for other program staff (without formal qualifications) are also reported. Because the data is collected in ranges, it is not possible to calculate either the average wage or the median wage for RECEs and other program staff.
The median wage is, however, the wage of the staff member in the 50th percentile position. With 47% of RECEs having hourly wages of $20 or less and 53% of RECEs having hourly wages of over $20, it would appear that the median wage of RECEs in child care centres in Ontario in 2019 was very close to $20. By the same logic, we can say that the median wage for staff with a director’s approval and for other program staff was between $15.01 and $20.
If I use the Job Bank web site to get data on Early Childhood Educators and Assistants for Ontario in 2019, I find that the median wage in 2018-2019[2] was $19.75 and for 2019-2020 was $20. Interestingly, this median is very close to the estimate for RECEs in Ontario that comes from the Ontario annual census survey.
In my next blog post, I will look at wage comparisons based on the Job Bank data.
[1] For example, the Annual Report of Ontario’s College of Early Childhood Educators for 2020-21 tells us that only 56% of Registered Early Childhood Educators (RECEs) in the province are actually employed in licensed child care. Another 32% are employed in the education sector and 12% elsewhere.
[2] Job Bank uses two years of Labour Force Survey data to get its wage estimates for NOC 42202, averaging the wage reports over the surveys from that two-year period.