Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $60,730. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 97,890, or 0.06% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 17,600 jobs; the top three states sum to 35.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: New York posts a location quotient of 2.90, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $60,730 at the 25th percentile, $80,190 at the middle, $121,600 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $147,490, a ratio of 4.1 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

The state spread for Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary runs from the $129,330 median in Hawaii down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in New York (17,600 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary stands number 274 by employment and number 207 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Educational Instruction and Library Occupations, the group median wage is $76,210 across 64 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 5% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.1% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 13 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $80,190, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 15,040 jobs, 15.4% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 149 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $66,630 a year, against $154,570 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $80,190 works out to $6,682 a month before taxes, $3,084 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,542 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($60,730) to the 75th ($121,600) is worth $60,870 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $88,209 would sit between the median ($80,190) and the 75th percentile ($121,600), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $60,730, is $19,460 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Educational Instruction and Library Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Postsecondary, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School, Special Education Teachers, Middle School, Business Teachers, Postsecondary, Nursing Instructors and Teachers, Postsecondary. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.