Special Education Teachers, Preschool 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, Preschool worker at that point in the distribution, so $81,330 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 28,200 jobs nationally, Special Education Teachers, Preschool make up 0.02% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: New York alone holds 4,460 of those jobs, the top three states hold 35.8%, and the deepest concentration sits in New York (location quotient 2.56, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $49,370 at the 25th percentile, $62,190 at the middle, $81,330 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $93,790, 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, 41 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $129,860; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Special Education Teachers, Preschool stands number 494 by employment and number 373 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 18% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 17 of the 40 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $62,190, 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 4,420 jobs, 15.7% 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, St. Louis, MO-IL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $53,470 a year, against $122,240 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 Special Education Teachers, Preschool paycheck, gross, is $2,392 every two weeks on an annual $62,190, which is $5,182 a month and $1,196 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($49,370) to the 75th ($81,330) is worth $31,960 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $68,409 would sit between the median ($62,190) and the 75th percentile ($81,330), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $49,370, is $12,820 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: Teachers and Instructors, All Other, Educational Instruction and Library Workers, All Other, Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Postsecondary, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School, Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.