Philosophy and Religion 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 Philosophy and Religion Teachers, Postsecondary offer sit among all 20,840 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 20,840 Philosophy and Religion 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 3.25, meaning the occupation holds 3.25 times its national share of local jobs. New York employs the most people outright, 1,850 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 24.2% of the national total.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $87,360 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($134,910) is 2.8 times the 10th percentile ($47,550), a gap of $87,360 a year. The mean of $88,210 sitting above the median of $78,050 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts New York first at 1,850 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $103,210. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Philosophy and Religion Teachers, Postsecondary stands number 553 by employment and number 230 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 2% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 15 of the 42 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $78,050, 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 1,610 jobs, 7.7% 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, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $79,310 a year, against $109,150 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

As a household number, $78,050 a year is $6,504 a month gross, $3,002 every two weeks, $1,501 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($60,980) to the 75th ($101,680) is worth $40,700 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 $6,504 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 $85,855 would sit between the median ($78,050) 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, $60,980, is $17,070 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Mathematical Science Teachers, Postsecondary, Psychology Teachers, Postsecondary, Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary, Special Education Teachers, All Other, Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English as a Second Language Instructors, Computer Science Teachers, Postsecondary. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.