The Real Cost of Rolling Back Head Start Wage Requirements

On May 12, 2026, the Office of Head Start published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) proposing to rescind the 2024 Head Start teacher wage regulations. The regulations required the creation of wage scales and progress toward pay parity by 2031, with Head Start salaries reaching public pre-K levels or 90% of kindergarten teacher pay. 

NIEER's new brief examines how rolling back Head Start wage requirements could impact access, teacher turnover, quality, and school readiness. The report helps to shed light on the gaps in services to eligible families, existing wages for Head Start educators, impacts on turnover and retention issues, and consequences this poses for program quality and service delivery. It includes state-by-state data including comparisons between Head Start and K-12 teacher salaries. 

The goal of the Head Start program is to improve the school readiness of children in economically disadvantaged circumstances to break the cycle of poverty. To do so, Head Start must produce robust impacts on learning and development that sustain gains in educational achievement. In response to rigorous evidence that Head Start did not uniformly produce such results, the 2007 reauthorization of the Head Start Act under the George W. Bush administration, required higher qualifications for the Head Start teaching workforce, increased operating hours, and greater accountability for educational quality.

Nearly two decades later, funding limitations have undermined the progress that the law requires. Proposed changes to Head Start in the recent NPRM would reverse requirements for teacher salary parity, while others changes that may be proposed, such as increasing class sizes and child-teacher ratios, risk further undermining rather than improving Head Start effectiveness and returns to taxpayers. Head Start requires more funding, not less, if it is to fulfill its purpose.