Early Years Employment Regulation Orders: The Seven Rates Irish Providers Must Pay

If you run a Tusla-registered early years or school-age childcare service in Ireland, there is a statutory floor under what you pay every member of staff, and it has nothing to do with the National Minimum Wage. Two Employment Regulation Orders set it, both operative from 13 October 2025, and two of the seven rates in them depend on a qualification.

One warning before the numbers. The Workplace Relations Commission page for this sector still displays the June 2024 rates. If you are checking your payroll against that page, you are checking it against superseded figures.

The two Orders

Both were made by the Early Years Service Joint Labour Committee and both took effect on 13 October 2025:

• S.I. No. 477 of 2025 — Employment Regulation (Amendment) Order (Early Years Service Joint Labour Committee) No. 1 2025
• S.I. No. 478 of 2025 — the same, No. 2 2025

An Employment Regulation Order is not guidance. It is a statutory instrument fixing minimum pay for a whole sector, enforceable by the Workplace Relations Commission, and it binds every employer in scope regardless of whether they were party to the negotiations.

The seven rates

Set out below with the Order each sits in, and whether it carries a qualification condition.

• Early Years Educator — €15.00 per hour. S.I. 477/2025. No qualification condition.
• School Age Childcare Practitioner — €15.00. S.I. 477/2025. No qualification condition.
• Lead Educator, also called Room Leader, and SAC Coordinator — €16.00. S.I. 478/2025. No qualification condition.
• Graduate Lead Educator and Graduate SAC Coordinator — €17.50. S.I. 478/2025. Requires a minimum QQI Level 7 or equivalent, approved by the Department.
• Deputy or Assistant Manager — €18.00. S.I. 478/2025. No qualification condition, and note there is no Graduate tier for this role at all.
• Centre Manager — €19.00. S.I. 478/2025. No qualification condition.
• Graduate Centre Manager — €20.25. S.I. 478/2025. Requires a minimum QQI Level 7 or equivalent, approved by the Department.

So of seven tiers, five are defined purely by role and two by qualification. That is narrower than the sector shorthand of a qualification-linked pay scale suggests, but it is also quite precise about where a qualification converts into money.

Contact and non-contact hours

The €15.00 rate applies to all working hours, to include contact and non-contact hours. This is the obligation most often missed. Planning time, staff meetings, preparation, parent communication, training time and clean-down are working hours. Paying the rate for floor time only and treating the rest as unpaid or differently paid does not comply.

Age sub-minima

Age-based sub-minima apply across all the roles: 70 per cent for under-18s, 80 per cent at 18, 90 per cent at 19, and 100 per cent from 20. For an Early Years Educator that produces €10.50, €12.00, €13.50 and €15.00 respectively.

Two separate legal mechanisms, and keeping them apart matters

There are two qualification obligations in Irish early years and they do different work. Conflating them is the commonest error in sector commentary.

The Level 5 floor is a registration obligation. Regulation 9(4) of S.I. No. 221/2016 requires each employee working directly with children to hold at least a major award in Early Childhood Care and Education at Level 5 on the National Qualifications Framework, or a qualification deemed by the Minister to be equivalent. Note the field in the Regulations is Early Childhood Care and Education, not Early Learning and Care — ELC is the current QQI award family that satisfies the requirement, but the statutory words are the older ones. Note also that it says major award, so a bundle of minor awards does not satisfy it. Our guide to Tusla registration and the 2016 Regulations covers that regime, including the ratios and the exemptions.

The Level 7 step is a pay obligation. It appears nowhere in the Regulations. It exists in the EROs, as the condition for the two Graduate rates, and separately as a funding premium condition.

So Level 5 decides whether you may employ someone in the role at all. Level 7 decides what you must pay them once they are in it. Different instruments, different consequences for getting it wrong.

What the Level 7 step actually costs

Two numbers, and they are the ones to put in front of a finance director.

Moving an existing Room Leader to Level 7 moves their statutory minimum from €16.00 to €17.50 — a €1.50 an hour increase. Moving a Centre Manager moves theirs from €19.00 to €20.25, or €1.25.

Those are increases in your legal floor, not in your discretion. If you support an employee through a Level 7 qualification, the rate follows automatically on completion and recognition, so the decision to fund study is also a decision to raise a wage bill. That is the honest framing, and it is why the funding side matters.

Two things offset it. The Core Funding Graduate Lead Educator Premium and Graduate Manager Premium pay the employer for having graduates in those roles — though neither the current euro values nor the precise qualification criteria for those premiums are published, so nobody should plan against a specific figure. And the Nurturing Skills Learner Fund covers up to 90 per cent of degree fees, with 80 per cent paid to the institution each year, capped at €3,200 per academic year, and the final 10 per cent refunded after completion provided the graduate stays in the sector for six months.

One critical eligibility point on that fund, because it turns on the employer rather than the employee: an employee cannot access it unless the service holds a current signed Core Funding contract with the Department. The fund also covers Level 7 and Level 8 degrees only — it does not fund Level 5 or Level 6 courses, which is a widely repeated error.

And where demand exceeds the budget, priority goes first to services with no graduates at all, then to those with fewer, then to services supporting the most disadvantaged children, then to lead educator and manager roles. If you have no graduates on staff, you are at the front of the queue rather than the back.

The part that is genuinely uncertain

These Orders are under legal challenge, and any post or payroll decision that does not say so is incomplete.

In February 2026 three providers — Mary Geary Childcare in Cork, Kidology, and Faylinn in Gorey — were granted leave to seek judicial review to quash the current Order. The reported grounds include that the Labour Court process did not comply with the Industrial Relations Act 1946; that the Order fails to address rates for workers entering the sector after the age of 18 as required by section 42A(5); that it appears to be founded on section 15 of the National Minimum Wage Act 2000 rather than the 1946 Act, which is said to explain the sub-basic rate for 19-year-olds that the 1946 Act does not provide for; that it does not explain how the rates were arrived at; and that linking increases to an anticipated government grant was contrary to the Act.

The matter was listed to return on 21 April 2026. We were not able to verify the outcome, or whether any stay applies to the Orders. Contemporaneous reporting did not indicate that they were suspended, so the prudent position is that the 13 October 2025 rates are operative and should be paid, while treating the legal position as live.

On the question of a further Order: Core Funding Year 5 ring-fences up to €45m for further Employment Regulation Orders from September 2026 or 2027, contingent on Joint Labour Committee negotiations. That wording implies none has yet been made, and the Labour Court hosts a document named for 2026 whose content is in fact the June 2025 proposal that became S.I. 477/2025. So treat 13 October 2025 as the current operative date and check before assuming a newer Order exists.

What to do this week

Three checks, in order of how much they cost to get wrong.

First, compare your current rates against the seven above rather than against the WRC page, and confirm you are paying for non-contact hours at the applicable rate. That is the exposure with the shortest route to a WRC complaint.

Second, identify who in your service holds a Level 7 or above and is working as a Room Leader, SAC Coordinator or Manager. If they qualify as Graduate under the Order, the higher rate is already their legal minimum — this is a backdated-liability question, not a planning one.

Third, before funding anyone through a degree, check that your Core Funding contract is in place, because without it your employee cannot apply to the Learner Fund at all. For the qualification routes themselves and how the Irish and English systems differ, see our guide to becoming an early years educator.