Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School 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 Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $58,840. 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

The occupation employed 104,450 people in May 2024, 0.07% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 24,700 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 40.0% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Texas, whose location quotient of 2.63 says this work is 2.63 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $98,720, which is 2.0 times the $48,840 at the 10th, a difference of $49,880 annually. Because the mean wage ($70,550) sits above the median ($63,910), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $98,580; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School stands number 263 by employment and number 347 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 16% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.2% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 26 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $63,910, 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

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is the largest metro employer with 5,940 jobs, 5.7% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $52,440 a year, against $100,790 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School paycheck, gross, is $2,458 every two weeks on an annual $63,910, which is $5,326 a month and $1,229 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($58,840) to the 75th ($78,650) is worth $19,810 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $70,301 would sit between the median ($63,910) and the 75th percentile ($78,650), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $58,840, is $5,070 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

Sibling occupations in Educational Instruction and Library Occupations: Special Education Teachers, Secondary School, Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary, Postsecondary Teachers, All Other, Librarians and Media Collections Specialists, Teachers and Instructors, All Other, Educational Instruction and Library Workers, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.