Special Education Teachers, Secondary 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, Secondary School worker at that point in the distribution, so $87,140 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 162,780 jobs nationally, Special Education Teachers, Secondary School make up 0.11% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: New York alone holds 17,030 of those jobs, the top three states hold 24.4%, and the deepest concentration sits in Vermont (location quotient 2.43, 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: $58,180 at the 25th percentile, $69,590 at the middle, $87,140 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $58,120, a ratio of 2.2 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

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $101,250, and New York the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Special Education Teachers, Secondary School stands number 189 by employment and number 288 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 9% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.8% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 20 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $69,590, 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 16,090 jobs, 9.9% 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, Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent, FL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $50,620 a year, against $117,530 in San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $5,799 a month before tax, $2,677 biweekly, $1,338 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($58,180) to the 75th ($87,140) is worth $28,960 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $76,549 would sit between the median ($69,590) and the 75th percentile ($87,140), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $58,180, is $11,410 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Political Science Teachers, Postsecondary, Career/Technical Education Teachers, Middle School, Physics Teachers, Postsecondary, Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement Teachers, Postsecondary, Social Work Teachers, Postsecondary, Museum Technicians and Conservators. The full directory is on the Careers hub.