Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary 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 Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $64,130. 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

BLS counted 12,380 Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Massachusetts, where the location quotient is 2.49, meaning the occupation holds 2.49 times its national share of local jobs. New York employs the most people outright, 1,280 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 26.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $64,130 at the 25th percentile, $82,540 at the middle, $113,000 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $117,910, a ratio of 3.4 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 47 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $129,760; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary stands number 655 by employment and number 195 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 8% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 19 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $82,540, 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 1,130 jobs, 9.1% 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, Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $112,210 a year, against $123,660 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 annual wage of $82,540 works out to $6,878 a month before taxes, $3,175 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,587 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($64,130) to the 75th ($113,000) is worth $48,870 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $90,794 would sit between the median ($82,540) and the 75th percentile ($113,000), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $64,130, is $18,410 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: Environmental Science Teachers, Postsecondary, Archivists, Anthropology and Archeology Teachers, Postsecondary, Library Science Teachers, Postsecondary, Geography Teachers, Postsecondary, Family and Consumer Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.