Law Teachers, Postsecondary Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Law Teachers, Postsecondary offer sit among all 22,800 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 22,800 Law 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 5.96, meaning the occupation holds 5.96 times its national share of local jobs. New York employs the most people outright, 2,540 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 19.3% of the national total.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $126,650 and the mean of $139,950. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 36 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 36 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Tennessee at $171,280; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Law Teachers, Postsecondary stands number 531 by employment and number 61 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 66% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 20 of the 35 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $126,650, 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 2,750 jobs, 12.1% 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, Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $134,060 a year, against $177,020 in Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH. 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 $126,650 works out to $10,554 a month before taxes, $4,871 per biweekly paycheck, and $2,436 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($84,540) to the 75th ($173,580) is worth $89,040 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 $139,315 would sit between the median ($126,650) and the 75th percentile ($173,580), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $84,540, is $42,110 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: Educational Instruction and Library Workers, All Other, Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Postsecondary, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School, Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary, Special Education Teachers, Middle School. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.