Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education offer sit among all 1,072,540 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

May 2024 employment stood at 1,072,540, or 0.70% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 112,300 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Hawaii posts a location quotient of 1.65, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $47,330 or less, and one in ten earns $104,670 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.2 to 1 and the annual gap is $57,340. The mean ($73,700) versus median ($64,580) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $99,640; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education stands number 31 by employment and number 338 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 15% less than its group median, and it supplies 12.0% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $64,580, 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 77,530 jobs, 7.2% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

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, $48,040 a year, against $114,720 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $64,580 a year is $5,382 a month gross, $2,484 every two weeks, $1,242 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($57,800) to the 75th ($83,010) is worth $25,210 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 $5,382 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 $71,038 would sit between the median ($64,580) and the 75th percentile ($83,010), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $57,800, is $6,780 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: Curators, Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies Teachers, Postsecondary, Farm and Home Management Educators, Architecture Teachers, Postsecondary, Agricultural Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.