More than half of all childcare jobs in Australia do not last a year. Australian Taxation Office data show 52.4% of child care services jobs ended within twelve months in 2022–23, more than double the exit rate in primary and secondary education. For centre directors, that is not just a recruitment statistic, it is a live risk to ratios, continuity of care, and your next assessment and rating visit. This guide sets out the real drivers behind childcare turnover and seven practical strategies operators are using to retain educators, including how the Worker Retention Payment, flexible rostering, and the new casual-to-permanent pathway fit into a retention plan.
Why turnover hits childcare harder than other sectors
Turnover in early childhood education and care has historically run well above the wider Australian workforce. Research covering 2015 to 2020 found annual turnover among early childhood teachers and educators ranging from 20% to 37%, compared with roughly 9.5% across all Australian occupations at the time. More recent industry reporting places turnover above 30% in some regions, particularly among rural and remote services.
The real drivers of turnover
Before choosing strategies, it helps to be specific about what is actually pushing educators out the door. Four factors show up consistently across sector research and centre-level exit data:
- Administrative burden. Paperwork, compliance reporting, and credential tracking increasingly fall on room leaders and educators rather than dedicated admin staff, cutting into time that should be spent with children.
- Workload pressure. Ratio compliance, unfilled shifts, and short-staffing push remaining staff into unsustainable workloads. Childcare services also carry a higher rate of work-related injury than the Australian workforce average, at 14.2 claims per million hours worked compared with 6.5 across all industries, according to Jobs and Skills Australia workforce research, which itself contributes to attrition.
- Lack of career pathways. Without a visible route from Certificate III through to a Diploma or an early childhood teaching qualification, many educators experience the job as a dead end rather than a career.
7 strategies to reduce staff turnover
1. Put the Worker Retention Payment to work as a retention lever, not a compliance line item
The ECEC Worker Retention Payment funds a staged 15% wage increase for eligible educators and teachers, administered by the Department of Education. In June 2026, the federal government extended the Payment to 30 June 2028 and expanded eligibility to Family Day Care and In Home Care services that employ all their educators directly. Combined with recent wage increases, the government reports a typical full-time educator is now earning around $255 more per week than in December 2024, and around $410 more per week for early childhood teachers. Services already in the program must keep fee growth under 5.8% between 8 August 2026 and 7 August 2027 to remain eligible.
For operators, the retention value of the Payment depends on two things: paying the correct current minimum hourly rate, which changes as base award rates rise under the Fair Work Commission's gender undervaluation determination, and making sure staff understand what they are being paid and why. Confirm your current WRP minimum rates directly through the Department of Education's rates page before your next pay run, since rates have already been revised twice in 2026.
2. Reduce the administrative load carried by centre-based educators
Administrative burden is one of the most consistently cited reasons educators give for leaving, and one of the easiest for operators to act on directly. Centralising credential expiry tracking, incident reporting, and compliance documentation, rather than leaving it to individual room leaders to manage manually, gives educators back time to spend with children, which is itself a quality outcome under the National Quality Standard. QuickCare's real-time compliance tracking removes the manual chasing of WWCC renewals, First Aid certificates, and qualification records that otherwise falls to already-stretched staff.
3. Build flexible rostering that protects against burnout
Rigid rosters that rely on permanent staff to absorb every gap are a direct driver of the burnout and injury rates behind sector turnover. Building rostering around a flexible casual pool, rather than asking core educators to repeatedly cover unfilled shifts, protects your permanent team's wellbeing and reduces the workload pressure that pushes people out. Filling short-notice gaps through an on-demand staffing model keeps ratios compliant without burning out the staff you are trying to keep.
4. Create a genuine casual-to-permanent conversion pathway
Since 26 August 2024, casual employees have had a formal route to permanent employment under the National Employment Standards, known as the employee choice pathway. Eligible casuals, generally those employed for at least six months (twelve months for small business employers), can give their employer written notice that they want to move to full-time or part-time employment. The employer must respond within 21 days and can only refuse on specific, limited grounds set out in the Fair Work Act.
Treating this as a genuine career step, rather than a compliance obligation to be managed defensively, turns a legal requirement into a retention tool. Educators who can see a defined route from casual shifts to a permanent contract, with the leave entitlements and income certainty that come with it, have one less reason to look elsewhere.
5. Map real credential and career pathways
Wage compression and a lack of visible progression compound each other. An educator who cannot see how a Certificate III leads to a Diploma, and eventually to an early childhood teaching qualification or a room leader or educational leader role, experiences pay and career as fixed. Publishing a clear internal pathway, tied to the National Early Childhood Worker Register and recognised RTO qualifications, and linking pay reviews to milestones along that pathway, gives educators a reason to grow with your service rather than move sideways to a competitor for the same wage.
6. Use exit and stay interviews to find the real cause, not the assumed one
Operators often assume pay is the dominant reason educators leave, and address only that. Structured exit interviews, backed by periodic stay interviews with current staff, tend to surface a mix of causes: administrative load, rostering unpredictability, and a lack of recognition alongside pay. Quantifying these reasons at your own service, rather than relying on sector-wide assumptions, lets you target the one or two levers that will move the needle for your team.
7. Treat workforce stability as a lever for your NQS rating, not just an HR metric
Continuity of staff is not incidental to quality, it is written into the National Quality Standard. Quality Area 4 explicitly addresses the organisation of educators and continuity of staff, and Quality Area 7 covers the governance and leadership practices that support a stable team. Services that keep the same educators working with the same children over time are better placed to demonstrate both. For multi-site operators, workforce stability also matters at the network level: consistent staffing practices across every centre make it easier to maintain the same quality outcomes wherever a family walks in.
Where to start
None of these seven levers works well in isolation. The Worker Retention Payment and the new casual conversion rules give operators genuine tools to act on in 2026, but they only translate into lower turnover when paired with the operational changes above: less admin load on educators, rosters that do not rely on burnout to function, and a visible path from casual shifts to a permanent, progressing career.
If you are not sure where your own turnover is really coming from, start with your roster and your compliance workload before assuming the answer is pay. QuickCare's workforce management platform is built around exactly this problem, from filling shift gaps without overloading your permanent team to keeping every educator's credentials current without the manual chasing. Book a walkthrough to see where the biggest gains are for your service.
