Physics 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 ($54,880) to the 90th ($169,740). 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 13,590, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 1,340 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.1% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: District of Columbia posts a location quotient of 2.06, 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 $169,740, which is 3.1 times the $54,880 at the 10th, a difference of $114,860 annually. Because the mean wage ($105,460) sits above the median ($97,360), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 1,340 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $128,190. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Physics Teachers, Postsecondary stands number 633 by employment and number 138 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 28% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 18 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $97,360, 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 980 jobs, 7.2% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $122,570 a year, against $122,570 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Physics Teachers, Postsecondary paycheck, gross, is $3,745 every two weeks on an annual $97,360, which is $8,113 a month and $1,872 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($66,730) to the 75th ($130,150) is worth $63,420 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $107,096 would sit between the median ($97,360) and the 75th percentile ($130,150), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $66,730, is $30,630 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: Biological Science Teachers, Postsecondary, 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. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.