The Trump administration has officially cancelled the Biden-era rule that would have forced Head Start programs to raise their teachers' pay over the coming years. The Department of Health and Human Services said Friday it has finalized the rollback of the 2024 rule, which required larger Head Start programs to raise wages until, by 2031, their teachers matched the pay of local public school pre-K teachers.
Head Start is the federal program that gives free early education to young children from low-income families. It runs on a budget of about $12 billion a year and serves roughly 700,000 children. The Biden administration put the pay rule in place in August 2024 to fight high turnover after the pandemic — in October 2023, 15 percent of Head Start staff positions stood vacant, and in 2022 roughly 3 in 10 staff at Early Head Start programs, which serve the youngest children, left their jobs. The rule was expected to raise the average Head Start teacher's pay by about $10,000; the average salary is under $40,000 a year, while the average public school teacher earns more than $70,000.
The administration says the rule had to go because of what it would have cost the children themselves. In its Federal Register notice, the agency said rolling back the wage requirements "restores flexibility to local Head Start programs and improves access for children and families by removing the costly requirements added in 2024," and that cancelling them "removes a burdensome unfunded mandate that would impact programs' ability to continue operating at current levels and would have necessitated laying off staff." Even the Biden administration had acknowledged that without more money from Congress, the higher pay requirements could have translated into slots for about 110,000 fewer children. HHS stressed that nothing stops programs from raising pay on their own: "This final rule reflects trust in Head Start program leaders to run their programs, value staff, and make decisions on staff compensation given the local context and on their own timeline."
The decision follows a public comment process on the rollback proposal the administration issued in May, which drew nearly 300 comments — some saying Head Start teachers deserve higher pay, others saying program operators should have the flexibility to set staff pay themselves. The wage rule is not the only Biden-era Head Start standard in the administration's sights: a broader rollback of the program's quality standards, including class-size ratios and family support services, is still pending, and the agency describes that change the same way — more flexibility for programs, and more access for families.
For the families who use Head Start, the trade-off is plain. On one side, teachers who were promised a path to public-school-level pay by 2031 will not get those required raises, in a program that has struggled to keep staff. On the other, the administration argues that forcing the raises without the money to pay for them would have closed classrooms and laid off staff — meaning fewer of the free preschool places that working families depend on. What is certain is that the choice is now back with the local programs: each one decides its own teachers' pay, on its own timeline.
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