Preschool Teachers, Except Special Education Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Preschool Teachers, Except Special Education ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $31,250. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 445,080 people in May 2024, 0.29% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 49,260 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 26.0% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Vermont, whose location quotient of 1.68 says this work is 1.68 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $60,070, which is 2.1 times the $28,300 at the 10th, a difference of $31,770 annually. Because the mean wage ($41,450) sits above the median ($37,120), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Nebraska posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $50,270, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Preschool Teachers, Except Special Education stands number 80 by employment and number 758 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 51% less than its group median, and it supplies 5.0% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $37,120, 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 31,000 jobs, 7.0% 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, Montgomery, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $28,440 a year, against $56,990 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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: $3,093 a month before tax, $1,428 biweekly, $714 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($31,250) to the 75th ($46,550) is worth $15,300 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 $40,832 would sit between the median ($37,120) and the 75th percentile ($46,550), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $31,250, is $5,870 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: Instructional Coordinators, Tutors, Special Education Teachers, Secondary School, Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary, Postsecondary Teachers, All Other, Librarians and Media Collections Specialists. The full directory is on the Careers hub.