Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten and Elementary School Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten and Elementary School worker at that point in the distribution, so $79,320 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

With 231,570 jobs nationally, Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten and Elementary School make up 0.15% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 41,010 of those jobs, the top three states hold 34.3%, and the deepest concentration sits in West Virginia (location quotient 2.16, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $47,590 or less, and one in ten earns $100,620 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.1 to 1 and the annual gap is $53,030. The mean ($70,150) versus median ($63,000) 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 California at $90,530; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten and Elementary School stands number 145 by employment and number 358 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 17% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.6% 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 $63,000, 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 20,410 jobs, 8.8% 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, Tucson, AZ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $51,640 a year, against $104,280 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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

The median annual wage of $63,000 works out to $5,250 a month before taxes, $2,423 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,212 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($57,050) to the 75th ($79,320) is worth $22,270 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 $69,300 would sit between the median ($63,000) and the 75th percentile ($79,320), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $57,050, is $5,950 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: Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School, Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary, Special Education Teachers, Middle School, Business Teachers, Postsecondary, Nursing Instructors and Teachers, Postsecondary, Library Technicians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.