Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary worker at that point in the distribution, so $60,410 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

BLS counted 155,010 Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary jobs in May 2024, which is 0.10% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Michigan, where the location quotient is 4.13, meaning the occupation holds 4.13 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 26,370 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 38.0% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $32,640 at the 25th percentile, $44,930 at the middle, $60,410 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $45,540, a ratio of 2.6 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

The state spread for Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary runs from the $75,610 median in Ohio down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (26,370 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary stands number 197 by employment and number 644 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 41% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.7% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 18 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $44,930, 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

Ann Arbor, MI is the largest metro employer with 12,930 jobs, 8.3% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Huntsville, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $20,280 a year, against $66,420 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $44,930 works out to $3,744 a month before taxes, $1,728 per biweekly paycheck, and $864 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($32,640) to the 75th ($60,410) is worth $27,770 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 $49,423 would sit between the median ($44,930) and the 75th percentile ($60,410), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $32,640, is $12,290 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: Communications Teachers, Postsecondary, Special Education Teachers, Preschool, Law Teachers, Postsecondary, Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary, Philosophy and Religion Teachers, Postsecondary, Chemistry Teachers, Postsecondary. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.