Foreign Language and Literature 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 ($47,090) to the 90th ($134,960). 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

BLS counted 21,170 Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in District of Columbia, where the location quotient is 3.84, meaning the occupation holds 3.84 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 2,120 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 25.6% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $134,960, which is 2.9 times the $47,090 at the 10th, a difference of $87,870 annually. Because the mean wage ($87,670) sits above the median ($77,010), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Connecticut posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $106,430, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary stands number 545 by employment and number 240 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 1% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 16 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $77,010, 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 1,580 jobs, 7.5% 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $80,400 a year, against $122,370 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, 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

The median annual wage of $77,010 works out to $6,418 a month before taxes, $2,962 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,481 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($59,790) to the 75th ($101,680) is worth $41,890 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 $84,711 would sit between the median ($77,010) and the 75th percentile ($101,680), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $59,790, is $17,220 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: Recreation and Fitness Studies Teachers, Postsecondary, Economics Teachers, Postsecondary, Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary, Curators, Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies Teachers, Postsecondary. The full directory is on the Careers hub.