Middle School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical 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 ($47,050) to the 90th ($100,980). 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

The occupation employed 620,370 people in May 2024, 0.40% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 75,640 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 25.3% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in New Jersey, whose location quotient of 1.55 says this work is 1.55 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $53,930 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($100,980) is 2.1 times the 10th percentile ($47,050), a gap of $53,930 a year. The mean of $70,040 sitting above the median of $62,970 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Washington posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $99,150, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Middle School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education stands number 60 by employment and number 359 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 17% less than its group median, and it supplies 6.9% 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 $62,970, 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 40,710 jobs, 6.6% 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, $50,430 a year, against $109,030 in Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $5,248 a month before tax, $2,422 biweekly, $1,211 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($53,540) to the 75th ($79,380) is worth $25,840 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $69,267 would sit between the median ($62,970) and the 75th percentile ($79,380), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $53,540, is $9,430 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: Library Technicians, English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary, Education Teachers, Postsecondary, Biological Science Teachers, Postsecondary, Mathematical Science Teachers, Postsecondary, Psychology Teachers, Postsecondary. The full directory is on the Careers hub.