Economics Teachers, Postsecondary Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($57,550) to the 90th ($217,160). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 12,420, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 1,360 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Vermont posts a location quotient of 3.32, 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: $80,850 at the 25th percentile, $119,980 at the middle, $166,600 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $159,610, a ratio of 3.8 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 Economics Teachers, Postsecondary runs from the $154,840 median in New Hampshire down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in New York (1,360 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Economics Teachers, Postsecondary stands number 654 by employment and number 72 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 57% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 14 of the 40 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $119,980, 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 1,030 jobs, 8.3% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $156,140 a year, against $168,810 in Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $119,980 a year is $9,998 a month gross, $4,615 every two weeks, $2,307 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($80,850) to the 75th ($166,600) is worth $85,750 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $9,998 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $131,978 would sit between the median ($119,980) and the 75th percentile ($166,600), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $80,850, is $39,130 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: Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary, Curators, Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies Teachers, Postsecondary, Farm and Home Management Educators, Architecture Teachers, Postsecondary. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.