Wages of Early Childhood Educators and Assistants in Ontario

This table below supports the chart in my presentation to the recent (Jan 5, 2023) Building Blocks for Child Care webinar on child care expansion in Ontario. It is posted nearby on this website. The table and chart show the essential problem behind recruitment and retention problems of early childhood educators. Their wages are too low to attract many more educators. In essence, the average wage paid to early childhood educators is much lower than the hourly wages paid to workers in other occupations requiring a college education. Early childhood educators are paid as if they had only a high school education, so there is very little incentive to enter the profession. The data is from Statistics Canada, most of it from the Labour Force Survey across 2020 and 2021.

You can also compare this to data we have on Registered Early Childhood Educators in Ontario from 2019. Have a look at Figure 11 and the table below it from Ontario’s 2020 Annual Report. It shows that the median wage of RECEs in Ontario in 2019 was just a hair above $20 an hour. By the way, Ontario hasn’t yet published its 2021 Annual Report on how child care is doing in Ontario, even though they collected that data on March 31st, 2021. I wonder why.