Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary offer sit among all 1,375,300 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 1,375,300 Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary jobs in May 2024, which is 0.89% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Vermont, where the location quotient is 2.01, meaning the occupation holds 2.01 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 160,960 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 29.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $29,120 at the 25th percentile, $35,240 at the middle, $40,400 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $24,430, a ratio of 2.0 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $47,210; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary stands number 24 by employment and number 787 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 54% less than its group median, and it supplies 15.4% 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 $35,240, 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 123,210 jobs, 9.0% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 391 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, Tuscaloosa, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $22,300 a year, against $51,760 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. 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, $35,240 a year is $2,937 a month gross, $1,355 every two weeks, $678 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($29,120) to the 75th ($40,400) is worth $11,280 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 $2,937 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 $38,764 would sit between the median ($35,240) and the 75th percentile ($40,400), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $29,120, is $6,120 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.