Child care workers are one of the lowest-paid groups in the U.S. Their median national pay in 2023 was $14.60 an hour. This is lower than the wage for retail sales workers ($16.30/hour) and customer service workers ($19.08/hour). Wages have remained stubbornly low even as the price of child care has risen significantly in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a shock to the child care workforce, which declined by as much as 35% at the height of the pandemic. The size of the workforce has only recently returned to near prepandemic levels. In the meantime, the government made unprecedented short-term investments in child care. In this brief we examine how the child care workforce and child care workers’ total wages were impacted by the pandemic, including how those earning the most and those earning the least may have been impacted in different ways.