Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education 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 ($46,440) to the 90th ($102,010). 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 1,393,310, or 0.90% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 141,650 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Missouri posts a location quotient of 1.53, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $102,010, which is 2.2 times the $46,440 at the 10th, a difference of $55,570 annually. Because the mean wage ($69,790) sits above the median ($62,340), 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $99,110; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education stands number 22 by employment and number 371 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 18% less than its group median, and it supplies 15.6% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 21 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $62,340, 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 100,040 jobs, 7.2% 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, $41,990 a year, against $107,690 in El Centro, CA. 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

As a household number, $62,340 a year is $5,195 a month gross, $2,398 every two weeks, $1,199 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($50,680) to the 75th ($79,410) is worth $28,730 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 $5,195 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 $68,574 would sit between the median ($62,340) and the 75th percentile ($79,410), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $50,680, is $11,660 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: Self-Enrichment Teachers, Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten and Elementary School, Health Specialties Teachers, Postsecondary, Instructional Coordinators, Tutors, Special Education Teachers, Secondary School. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.