Despite heightened policy interest in early childhood care and education (ECCE), little is known about the ECCE workforce today or the extent to which this workforce has changed over a period of substantial investment in this sector. Using nationally-representative data, this paper fills this gap by documenting changes between 1990-2010 in the educational attainment, compensation and turnover of the ECCE workforce. We find that the national ECCE workforce remains a low-education, low-compensation, and high-turnover workforce. At the same time, the average educational attainment and compensation of ECCE workers increased substantially over the past two decades and turnover decreased sharply. We document a major shift in the composition of the ECCE workforce towards center-based settings and away from home-based settings. Surprisingly however, this shift towards more regulated settings is not the primary driver of the observed changes in the ECCE workforce. We show that improvements in the characteristics of the ECCE workforce were driven primarily by changes within sectors and, contrary to our expectations, we show that the home-based workforce, which faces the least stringent regulations, experienced the most improvement over the period examined, though home-based workers remain substantially different from formal care workers. (author abstract)