How to hire a head of school: requirements, pay, sourcing and screening

Start from your school's situation, not from a generic template. The profile that fits a school facing an enrollment plateau, a capital campaign or a founder's retirement looks different from the one that fits a school that mainly needs steady, capable management. Before anything is posted, your board should be able to name the three or four things the next head must accomplish in the first two or three years.

When heads and board chairs have been asked directly, they agree on what matters most. In NAIS's 2018 Governance Study, both groups agreed on a head's primary responsibilities: ensuring the school's financial well-being and instilling its climate and values. Both also named managing enrollment as the top issue facing their schools. Build the profile around that agreement — money, mission, enrollment and the people systems underneath them.

Write the profile down before you write the posting: the strategic priorities, the governance style that fits your board, the community's expectations, and any faith or pedagogical commitments that are non-negotiable. The profile becomes your screening rubric later. Without it, every interview drifts toward charisma.

Plan the search before a resignation forces it. NAIS reported in March 2026 that average head-of-school tenure at independent schools was 7.4 years, with a median near six years since 2017-18. The same analysis found that in four of five years from 2021 to 2025, more than 20% of head turnover at NAIS schools was unexpected. A departure you did not plan becomes a crisis only if nothing was in place for it.

A standing succession plan, reviewed by the board every year, keeps a departure from becoming a crisis. It covers three pieces: an emergency and interim plan for an abrupt exit, an honest look at your internal bench, and the trigger points that start a full search. Long tenure is part of the picture too — 9.3% of heads had served more than 15 years as of 2025-26, down from 13.9% in 2015-16 — so some boards are heading into planned, long-tenured transitions even as others face surprise departures.

The candidate-side view — titles, day-to-day duties, how educators reach the job — is a different question, and our career guide explains what a head of school does. The rest of this page stays on the board's side of the table.

There is no single answer, because different bodies set the requirements in each sector. Which rules bind your school depends on its sector, its state and — for a private school — the school's category under that state's rules. Confirm the rules that bind your school before requirements go into a posting.

At a private school, the board sets the qualifications it wants, inside whatever the state, an accreditor or a religious authority imposes on the school. Public-school norms do not transfer automatically in either direction. BLS states that most states require public school principals to be licensed as school administrators; its discussion makes no such statement for private school principals. So ask rather than assume: your state education agency, your accreditor and, where one applies, your diocese or religious authority can each tell you what they require of your head.

States do sometimes step in, category by category. Louisiana requires the principal, assistant principal or head of a BESE-approved nonpublic school to hold a master's degree in any area from an accredited institution, or to hold principalship on a Louisiana teaching certificate, and it requires the principal to be a full-time, on-site employee. That is Louisiana's rule for that category of school — it is not another state's rule and not every private school's.

At a charter school, you are hiring a public school's leader, and the requirements come from state charter law and your authorizer. Two examples show the spread. New Jersey's charter rules require charter principals — along with classroom teachers and professional support staff — to hold appropriate New Jersey certification, and require every charter to employ or contract a certified administrator at the principal level. Alaska's education agency says an Alaska charter school principal must hold a Type B Administrator Certificate. Each state writes its own rule, so confirm yours with your authorizer and state education agency.

Association and faith credentials are a separate layer: they are a school's or an association's requirement, not a state license. ACSI offers Head of School, Principal and Executive Director certificates covering administrative duties for K-12 administrators at Christian schools. AMI offers an AMI Montessori School Leadership certificate that it says is open to anyone interested in developing Montessori leadership skills. Ask for one when your mission calls for it, and verify it with the body that issues it.

Before you post: leader requirements differ by state, sector and school category. Confirm what binds your school with your state education agency, your charter authorizer, your accreditor or your religious authority — and verify any credential a candidate claims with the body that issued it.

Start with what the data is and is not. BLS has no private-school, charter-school or head-of-school occupation code. Its closest series, Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary (SOC 11-9032), mixes heads of school with principals, assistant principals and deans, so no BLS figure is a head-of-school salary.

With that label attached: in BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025, that occupation had a median annual wage of $105,840 across all elementary and secondary schools — public district, charter and private schools combined. The 10th to 90th percentile span was $76,380 to $167,760. In privately owned elementary and secondary schools only, the median was $98,020. BLS does not split that series by role, and whether any charter schools sit inside the privately owned figure is not established. Treat these as the wider administrator market, not as your benchmark for a head.

The closest thing to a head-specific benchmark carries its own label. At NAIS member schools, the median salary reported for a head of school in 2025-26 was $320,000 — NAIS member schools only, not all private schools, and not a private-school average. At those same schools, associate heads of school had a median of $200,000 and assistant heads $154,500. That ladder matters to you twice: it prices your internal candidates, and it shows how steep the step from deputy to head can be.

When schools post a head search publicly, the pay appears in the search itself. One dated example: Nichols School in Buffalo, New York, listed a July 2027 start and an annual salary range of $375,000-$500,000 plus executive benefits including a housing allowance and tuition remission. The range was public — the school posted it under New York's pay-transparency law. One school's posted range is not a norm, but it makes two points boards forget: the package is more than base salary, and a posted range can become public — as this one did.

Build your number from your own inputs instead: the package you can fund for the next three to five years, what comparable schools in your market pay, and internal equity against your division heads and business manager. Decide the whole package before candidates appear — base salary, housing or a housing allowance where your model calls for it, tuition remission, retirement contributions, professional development and relocation. Cost each element with your business office or CPA before it goes into an offer, and get the board's approval of the range in advance.

Start from sitting school leaders: heads elsewhere, associate and assistant heads ready to move up, division heads, and charter school principals and executive directors. Where you look decides how much of that pool you reach.

Retaining a search firm is one option. Carney Sandoe, a firm long active in independent-school hiring, runs a Search Group for retained leadership searches alongside its teacher Placement Group and a consulting arm. It says its services are free for candidates and that the schools who work with it are its clients and pay any fees. It also reports working with more than 2,000 independent, private, boarding and charter schools. Process design varies by firm: Educators' Collaborative, another firm in this market, says it starts each head search with stakeholder input sessions that feed a Leadership Profile, and stays engaged through the new head's first year. Evaluate firms unranked, and ask each for references from schools like yours.

What does a retained search cost? Fees vary, and search firms usually quote them per search; the search-firm pages our research reviewed do not publish fee figures. We could not confirm a typical head-search fee percentage, so we will not quote one. Ask each firm to put its fee, its expense policy and any replacement guarantee in writing before you sign an agreement.

You can also run the search yourself. Post the opening where candidates can find it: head of school jobs on SchoolHires shows what a posting looks like. Then work the channels your community already trusts — your state or regional independent school association, the network that serves your faith tradition, and referrals from trustees, faculty and families. Charter schools can add their own channels too — leaders already working at other campuses in the same network or management organization.

Two more sources sit inside the building. Internal candidates — an associate head or a division head — can shorten the transition, but test them against the same profile as outside candidates rather than appointing by default. And when a departure lands before the search can finish, an interim appointment keeps the school running. Treat the interim as a defined bridge with its own mandate, not an extended tryout.

Screening works when the rubric comes first. Turn the leadership profile into a scorecard before the first file arrives: the strategic priorities, the governance expectations, the mission commitments, and the evidence that would demonstrate each one. Score every candidate on the same rubric, so the committee compares evidence instead of impressions.

Appoint a search committee small enough to act, drawn from a board that is itself working-sized — the median NAIS member school has 18 trustees. Give the committee a clear charter: what it decides, what it only recommends, and how confidentiality runs. Decide early how and when faculty, families and other stakeholders meet the finalists.

Expect a specific paper trail, and borrow its structure even if you run the search alone. In Carney Sandoe's 2026 head searches, candidates submitted a cover letter and current résumé as separate PDFs. Selected candidates could then be asked for five professional references — not contacted without the candidate's permission — and writing samples written for the search. Consistent materials and staged references are what keep the comparison fair.

Check references earlier than feels natural. Educators' Collaborative says it contacts references earlier in a head search than is usual, to identify likely fits early. The logic applies to any committee: a reference conversation tells you what to probe in the next interview, and it works far better before you have fallen for a finalist.

Structure the rounds to test the profile: a board or committee round on strategy and governance, stakeholder meetings that show how the candidate reads your community, and a campus visit that ends with the candidate's questions. Ask the same core questions of every candidate so answers stay comparable, and probe the board-head working relationship directly — how they report, how they disagree, and what they expect from a board chair.

Before an offer, finish the file. Verify the credentials your sector and state require, run the background checks your state's rules call for, and have counsel review the employment contract before it goes out. A head's agreement is a different instrument from a faculty contract, and it should be drafted for your state.

Start more than a year out if you can. The head-of-school searches Carney Sandoe posted in spring 2026 — for Nichols School, Allen-Stevenson and Maret — all targeted a July 2027 start. Those schools were searching more than a year ahead of the date they needed their head seated.

The calendar logic is the faculty. Independent-school faculty recruiting concentrates in winter and spring: Carney Sandoe describes its hiring-conference season as running January through April each year, the window that marks the core of independent-school faculty hiring. A head seated before that window chooses the faculty; a head seated after it inherits one. If you want your next head building their own team, the search would need to conclude before that window opens.

Our research found no firm-published month-by-month search timeline, so build your own backwards from the start date: profile and committee first, sourcing and screening through the fall, finalist rounds and reference checks early enough to sign a contract before the school year ends. Charter schools should add their authorizer and board-approval steps to the same backward plan.

Do not let the calendar decide itself. With more than 20% of head turnover at NAIS schools unexpected in four of five years from 2021 to 2025, the boards that search well start before the vacancy exists. Keep an annual succession review, a current leadership profile on file, and a standing agreement on how an interim would be appointed if a resignation lands in the spring.

The hire is not finished at signing. About one in five new heads at NAIS schools leave their roles within three years or less of starting, a pattern the association says has held for much of the past decade. Of the heads who began non-interim roles in 2022-23, 23.8% were no longer in those positions by the March 2026 analysis. The first year is where boards keep — or lose — the hire they just made.

Take the pressure seriously. In a recent NAIS survey cited in the association's March 2026 turnover analysis, 44% of heads said they had considered leaving their position because of stress or burnout over the past year.

Onboard the relationship, not just the person. NAIS launched its Leadership Alignment Project in 2025 to help independent schools reduce head turnover. Its interviews found board-head alignment to be one of the most fragile areas of a headship, with role confusion, uneven communication and uncertainty about where governance ends and management begins as recurring strains. Put that boundary in writing during the first months: what the board decides, what the head decides, how evaluation works and how disagreement escalates.

Use the structured support that exists. NAIS's Institute for New Heads is a weeklong in-person summer program for heads starting their first or second year, followed by virtual support through the school year; its 2026 session ran July 11-17 in Atlanta. Registration for that session was $4,775 for member early-bird and $5,500 for member standard, or $6,200 and $6,925 for nonmembers, including hotel and all meals. Budget for whatever program you choose in the search year, not after the arrival.

Agree in writing, before the first day, how and when the board will evaluate the new head. Have counsel review the employment contract for the same reason: its term, renewal and separation provisions are governance decisions that should never be improvised at an exit.

A headship touches every other part of the employment picture — contracts, evaluation, pay design and the retention work that follows the faculty your head hires. Our guide to hiring for private and charter schools maps the whole cluster.

Employer information, not legal or tax advice. Requirements differ by state, sector and school; confirm what binds your school with your state education agency, your charter authorizer, your accreditor, the Department of Labor or counsel, as the question needs.