Education 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 ($38,650) to the 90th ($126,450). 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 59,090, or 0.04% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 5,760 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.1% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Vermont posts a location quotient of 1.98, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $38,650 or less, and one in ten earns $126,450 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 3.3 to 1 and the annual gap is $87,800. The mean ($78,500) versus median ($72,090) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $85,560, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Education Teachers, Postsecondary stands number 361 by employment and number 273 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% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 16 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $72,090, 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 4,490 jobs, 7.6% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $62,170 a year, against $108,060 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $72,090 works out to $6,008 a month before taxes, $2,773 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,386 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($50,630) to the 75th ($96,260) is worth $45,630 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 $79,299 would sit between the median ($72,090) and the 75th percentile ($96,260), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $50,630, is $21,460 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Preschool Teachers, Except Special Education, Self-Enrichment Teachers, Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten and Elementary School, Health Specialties Teachers, Postsecondary, Instructional Coordinators, Tutors. The full directory is on the Careers hub.