Special Education Teachers, All Other 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 ($43,220) to the 90th ($109,360). 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

With 39,350 jobs nationally, Special Education Teachers, All Other make up 0.03% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 8,470 of those jobs, the top three states hold 38.4%, and the deepest concentration sits in Connecticut (location quotient 3.80, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $109,360, which is 2.5 times the $43,220 at the 10th, a difference of $66,140 annually. Because the mean wage ($74,180) sits above the median ($67,430), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 44 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $96,600; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Special Education Teachers, All Other stands number 430 by employment and number 303 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 12% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 13 of the 44 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $67,430, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 2,930 jobs, 7.4% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 120 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

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, $50,150 a year, against $107,710 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $67,430 a year is $5,619 a month gross, $2,593 every two weeks, $1,297 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($53,470) to the 75th ($87,890) is worth $34,420 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 $5,619 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 $74,173 would sit between the median ($67,430) and the 75th percentile ($87,890), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $53,470, is $13,960 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: Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other, Political Science Teachers, Postsecondary, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Middle School, Physics Teachers, Postsecondary, Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement Teachers, Postsecondary, Social Work Teachers, Postsecondary. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.