Education’s Paycheck

The BLS counts 8,947,710 workers in the Education, Training, and Library occupational group as of May 2024. The group’s median wage is $59,220, and it has grown 6.1% since 2014 (from 8,435,780). But these topline numbers mask a workforce that is deeply stratified — not along the lines of experience or performance, but along the lines of job title and geography.

The largest single occupation is elementary school teachers: 1,393,310 workers at a median of $62,340. This is the backbone of American education — the teachers who shepherd children through reading, arithmetic, and the foundations of everything that follows. At the 10th percentile, an elementary teacher earns $46,440. At the 90th percentile: $102,010. The range is wide, but the middle is modest: a $62,340 median means half of all elementary teachers earn less than that, and many of them hold master’s degrees.

Trailing closely are teaching assistants — 1,375,300 of them, nearly as many as elementary teachers — earning a median of just $35,240. This is the education system’s dirty secret. For every teacher at the front of a classroom, there is nearly one teaching assistant who manages small groups, supports special education students, supervises lunch and recess, and handles the administrative labor that makes instruction possible. Their P10 is $23,710 — effectively minimum wage in many states. Their P90 is $48,140 — which is below the starting salary for the teachers they assist. The 1.375 million teaching assistants earn less than warehouse stockers ($37,090) and barely more than fast food workers ($30,430).

Secondary school teachers (1,072,540, $64,580 median), middle school teachers (620,370, $62,970), and special education teachers across all levels (roughly 527,000 combined, $63,000–$69,590) form the core classroom workforce. Below them in the pay hierarchy are substitute teachers (481,300, $38,470), preschool teachers (445,080, $37,120), and tutors (174,660, $40,090) — categories that have grown rapidly but remain among the lowest-paid workers requiring educational credentials.

Teaching is one of the few professions where a bachelor’s degree — and often a master’s degree — is legally required for entry, yet the pay consistently falls below other bachelor’s-level occupations. The BLS data makes this comparison unambiguous.

An elementary teacher with a bachelor’s degree (and often a master’s) earns $62,340. An accountant with the same degree earns $81,680. An HR specialist earns $72,910. A market research analyst earns $76,950. A financial analyst earns $101,350. A marketing manager earns $161,030. Every single comparison occupation that requires a bachelor’s degree and similar years of experience pays more than teaching — most of them substantially more.

The gap is not merely a matter of starting salary; it widens with seniority. A teacher’s wage ceiling is compressed: the P90 for elementary teachers is $102,010, and this typically requires 20+ years of experience plus a master’s degree or doctorate. An accountant’s P90 is $141,420. A financial analyst’s P90 is $180,550. A marketing manager’s P90 exceeds the BLS reporting threshold entirely. Teachers hit their ceiling faster and that ceiling is lower — a double compression that reduces lifetime earnings relative to nearly every other profession requiring similar education.

The conventional defense of teacher pay is that it comes with summers off, pension benefits, and job security. There is truth in each of these. But the BLS data measures only cash wages, and on that metric, the gap is clear. Teaching is the occupation where Americans with advanced degrees are most consistently underpaid relative to their education level. The median teacher with a master’s degree earns less than the median accountant with only a bachelor’s.

No occupation in America has a more dramatic geographic wage gap than K–12 teaching. The highest-paying state for elementary teachers is Washington at $99,110 — nearly double the lowest, Oklahoma at $47,470. The ratio of 2.09x is among the widest for any single occupation in the BLS data, reflecting the fact that teacher pay is set by state and district budgets rather than by market forces.

California ($98,190), DC ($94,730), Rhode Island ($86,900), and Massachusetts ($83,260) round out the top five. These are states with strong teachers’ unions, high costs of living, and tax bases that can support six-figure-adjacent salaries. At the other end, Missouri ($48,250), Mississippi ($48,440), South Dakota ($49,110), North Carolina ($49,400), and Arkansas ($50,550) cluster below $51,000 — wages that are below the national median for all occupations and that effectively ensure teachers in these states cannot afford the middle-class lifestyle that a college degree is supposed to provide.

The geographic divide creates perverse incentives. A teacher in Oklahoma earning $47,470 can move to Washington and nearly double their salary. In practice, many don’t — because of family ties, home ownership, pension vesting, and the simple friction of relocation. But the ones who are most mobile — young, talented, early-career teachers with the least to lose — are precisely the ones most likely to leave low-paying states, creating a brain drain in the states that can least afford it. Oklahoma has faced chronic teacher shortages for years. The BLS data suggests the reason is not a mystery: it’s the paycheck.

Perhaps the most striking comparison is between neighboring states. North Carolina ($49,400) and Virginia ($62,270) are separated by a border and $12,870 per year. Kansas ($50,820) and Colorado ($61,550) differ by $10,730. A teacher can drive 30 minutes across a state line and get a five-figure raise, which is exactly what many of them do.

Below the teachers in the education pay hierarchy lies a massive workforce that is essentially invisible in public discussions about education compensation. Teaching assistants (1,375,300 workers, $35,240 median) are the largest component of this hidden workforce. They are disproportionately women, disproportionately working in lower-income school districts, and disproportionately reliant on second jobs or spousal income to make ends meet. Their P10 wage of $23,710 translates to roughly $11.40 per hour — below the minimum wage in 14 states.

Substitute teachers (481,300, $38,470) have seen one of the steepest wage increases in the education sector — a 33.6% rise since 2019, from $28,790. This is the pandemic effect: school districts that previously paid substitutes $80–$100 per day were forced to raise rates dramatically when COVID-era absences surged and the available substitute pool collapsed. Many districts now pay $150–$200 per day, and some have converted long-term substitutes into permanent positions. Still, $38,470 for a worker who holds a college degree and manages a classroom of 25 children is, by any reasonable measure, inadequate.

Preschool teachers (445,080 workers, $37,120 median) are arguably the most underpaid educators in America relative to the importance of their work. Research consistently shows that early childhood education has the highest return on investment of any educational intervention — the landmark Perry Preschool Study found returns of $7–$12 for every dollar invested. Yet preschool teachers earn less than the median warehouse stocker. Their P10 wage of $28,300 means that one in ten preschool teachers in America earns roughly $13.60 per hour to educate three- and four-year-olds. The occupation has grown dramatically (from 352,420 in 2014 to 445,080 in 2024, a 26.3% increase driven by universal pre-K initiatives), but compensation has lagged far behind that growth.

Together, teaching assistants, substitutes, preschool teachers, and tutors account for roughly 2.5 million workers — nearly 28% of the education workforce — earning medians below $41,000. These are the support roles that make the education system function, and they are paid as if they were unskilled labor in a sector that requires patience, training, and extraordinary emotional endurance.

While teacher wages have grown modestly — elementary teachers gained 15.2% over the decade from $54,120 to $62,340 — the fastest-growing and best-compensated corner of education has been administration.

K–12 education administrators (principals, assistant principals, district administrators) have grown from 231,800 workers in 2014 to 319,630 in 2024 — a 37.9% increase. Their median wage is $104,070, with a P90 reaching $165,820. They earn 1.67 times what the teachers they supervise earn, and their ranks have grown nearly six times faster than teacher employment (which rose just 3% at the elementary level over the same decade).

Postsecondary education administrators — the deans, provosts, enrollment managers, and diversity officers at colleges and universities — have followed an identical trajectory: 131,070 in 2014, 176,420 in 2024 (+34.6%), with a median of $103,960 and a P90 of $212,420. The growth of university administration has been a running controversy in higher education for decades, and the BLS data confirms it: administrative headcount at colleges is growing twice as fast as faculty headcount.

The juxtaposition is uncomfortable. Over the same decade, America added roughly 88,000 K–12 administrators and roughly 40,000 elementary teachers. Administrator employment grew 37.9%; teacher employment grew 3.0%. And administrators earn $104,070 versus the teacher’s $62,340. The education system has chosen — through thousands of independent district and university budget decisions — to grow its management layer faster and compensate it better than its instructional workforce. Whether this reflects genuine organizational need or bureaucratic expansion is beyond what the BLS data can answer. But the numbers speak loudly.

Higher education creates its own internal pay hierarchy that is even more extreme than K–12. At the top sit law professors ($126,650 median), economics professors ($119,980), engineering professors ($106,120), and health specialties professors ($105,620). These are tenured or tenure-track faculty at research universities, often supplementing their BLS-tracked salaries with consulting fees, book royalties, and expert witness income. Business professors earn $97,270 at the median, with a P90 of $210,530 — among the highest for any occupation classified as education.

At the bottom of the postsecondary scale are postsecondary teaching assistants ($44,930), vocational education teachers ($61,490), and art, drama, and music teachers whose medians ($80,190) look reasonable until you consider that many of these positions are part-time adjunct roles that the BLS annualizes. A “$80,190 median” for an art professor may represent a tenured position at a well-funded university; it may also average in hundreds of adjuncts earning $3,000–$5,000 per course with no benefits.

The widest gap in higher education is between departments. An economics professor ($119,980) earns 1.67 times what an education professor ($72,090) earns at the same type of institution, with the same terminal degree, and often with similar years of experience. An engineering professor ($106,120) earns 1.36 times a history professor ($81,500). Market forces leak into academia through the outside options available to faculty: an economics professor could leave for Wall Street; a history professor cannot. The university pays accordingly, creating a salary structure where the disciplines closest to money earn the most money — a circularity that has deepened over the past two decades as business and STEM departments have expanded and humanities departments have contracted.