Win or lose on the field, high school football coaches can now celebrate one fact: under federal tax rules adopted in 2025, they can deduct out-of-pocket expenses they spend on their team.
This tax season, the new provisions increase the amount teachers can deduct and expand who is eligible—coaches and athletic directors are now included.
That’s good news for many teachers. But there’s one glaring exception, a group that still can’t take advantage of this modest tax benefit: early childhood educators.
Early educators have long been shut out of the existing Educator Expense Deduction (EED), which allows K-12 teachers to deduct up to $300 in classroom supplies. And they’re not eligible under the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act” legislation signed by President Donald Trump last summer. Once again, those who first teach our children are the last to be recognized for the essential role they play.
But a new bipartisan bill introduced last fall, and recently passed in the House of Representatives, seeks to change this. The Supporting Early-childhood Educators’ Deductions (SEED) Act would extend the deduction to early childhood educators. If passed by the Senate too, those who care for our youngest children could deduct these same out-of-pocket expenses.
At the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska, we surveyed 25,000 early educators nationwide. Roughly 90% incurred work-related expenses that would have been eligible under the EED.
On average, early educators spent nearly $200 on supplies, with the highest spending recorded in states such as Wyoming, Rhode Island, Hawaii, California, and Kansas.
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We need more—not fewer—incentives to retain and recruit early educators.
Turnover in the field is rampant, driven in part by low pay and a lack of respect. Nationally, early education workers earn a median hourly wage of $15.41. That’s on par with or even lower than the starting pay at many fast food restaurants and big box stores, and less than half that of elementary school teachers.
Buffett Institute data shows there are potentially 4.2 million children across the United States without access to child care. These shortages persist when early educators leave for jobs with higher pay and better benefits. And that directly impacts working families, who may miss work or leave the workforce altogether if they don’t have reliable care.
We must find solutions to support early educators and keep them in the field—and that doesn’t mean overlooking them in the tax code.
Without full Congressional passage of the SEED Act, here’s how this tax deduction imbalance could play out:
Imagine two teachers who work in the same elementary school, right across the hallway from one another. One teaches preschool; the other, Kindergarten.
They both spend their own money to buy extra crayons, fruit snacks, and picture books for their students. This happens every day in schools across America, where an estimated 95% of public school teachers dip into their own pockets for school supplies.
There’s one small silver lining for the Kindergarten teacher—now, she can deduct $300 in classroom supplies and an unlimited amount if she itemizes.
Same school. Same supplies. Same age range—one teaches 4-year-olds, one teaches 5-year-olds. One teacher has the option to save some money on her taxes, and the other doesn’t.
That doesn’t seem very fair to me.
Last year, I called on Congress to revise the federal tax code to include early childhood teachers in the Educator Expense Deduction.
They were not included in last year’s legislative package, but the current momentum of the SEED Act offers another opportunity to make this fix a reality.
The Educator Expense Deduction (EED) was created in 2002 as a temporary “above-the-line" tax benefit for K-12 teachers, meaning they can claim out-of-pocket and unreimbursed expenses, such as classroom supplies and professional development opportunities, regardless of whether they itemized or took the standard deduction.
The deduction has proven popular and drawn bipartisan support. Nearly 90% of K-12 educators claimed it for the 2021 tax year.
The Senate now has an opportunity to join the House to step up and add early educators to the list of educators eligible for state and federal income tax deductions. This is an easy solution to right a wrong and take a small step toward easing the financial burden of some of our lowest-paid teachers.
Walter S. Gilliam, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized early childhood policy expert and the executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute. He was previously a professor of child psychiatry and psychology at the Yale Child Study Center and director of Yale’s Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy.