Special Education Teachers, Middle 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, Middle School worker at that point in the distribution, so $81,940 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

The occupation employed 95,330 people in May 2024, 0.06% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 12,940 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 28.3% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in New Jersey, whose location quotient of 2.51 says this work is 2.51 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $102,730, which is 2.1 times the $48,070 at the 10th, a difference of $54,660 annually. Because the mean wage ($72,310) sits above the median ($64,880), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

The state spread for Special Education Teachers, Middle School runs from the $99,270 median in California down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in Texas (12,940 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Special Education Teachers, Middle School stands number 282 by employment and number 334 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 1.1% 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 $64,880, 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 9,070 jobs, 9.5% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $54,170 a year, against $106,370 in Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA. 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 $64,880 works out to $5,407 a month before taxes, $2,495 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,248 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($58,590) to the 75th ($81,940) is worth $23,350 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 $71,368 would sit between the median ($64,880) and the 75th percentile ($81,940), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $58,590, is $6,290 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: 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, Environmental Science Teachers, Postsecondary. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.