Teacher salary in 2026: the spread by grade and school type

BLS puts the median annual wage for high school teachers at $72,040 and for elementary school teachers at $63,970, both May 2025 estimates from the Occupational Outlook Handbook. Half of each group earned more than that; half earned less. What those medians hide is the more useful part: a high school range running from under $48,780 at the tenth percentile to over $107,600 at the ninetieth, inside one job title; an employer gap wider than the gap between grade levels; and a straight answer about why there is no state-by-state table in this post.

What teachers earn, by grade level

BLS does not publish a figure called "teacher salary." It publishes five - kindergarten, elementary, middle school, high school and special education are separate occupations with separate wage estimates, which is why the answer changes depending on which Handbook page a search drops you on. Three of the five line up cleanly side by side.

Teacher pay and outlook by grade level

BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 wage estimates and 2025-35 projections. Employment and openings in the elementary column are BLS's combined kindergarten-and-elementary group; the wage figures in that column are elementary teachers only.

	Elementary	Middle school	High school
Median annual wage, May 2025	$63,970	$64,370	$72,040
Lowest 10 percent earned less than	$47,960	$48,080	$48,780
Highest 10 percent earned more than	$104,340	$102,540	$107,600
Jobs held, 2025	1,530,500	630,100	1,087,500
Projected change, 2025-35	0% (-6,100)	0% (-2,600)	0% (-2,500)
Openings projected per year	99,400	38,800	63,500

How to read this. The median is the midpoint of a whole occupation nationally, not a starting salary and not an offer. A first-year Elementary School Teacher in a district that pays on a published step schedule starts below $63,970; a teacher far along that same schedule, holding a master's, sits nearer the top of the column. The median is where those two meet, averaged across every state and district in the country, and no single district sets its pay to hit it.

Where kindergarten sits in all this

Not in the table above, which is the first thing to know about it. BLS reports kindergarten teachers as their own wage estimate - $62,680 in May 2025, with the lowest 10 percent under $46,990 and the highest 10 percent over $101,830 - while folding them in with elementary teachers for the employment and openings counts. So the 1,530,500 jobs and the 99,400 projected annual openings in that column cover both groups at once, and the $63,970 median covers only one of them.

That is a small piece of bookkeeping with a practical edge. A candidate certified for early grades who reads the elementary median and expects it in a kindergarten posting is reading a number for a different occupation code, and the gap between the two medians is real money over a career.

Why there is no teacher salary by state table here

You searched for one. It is not in this post, and the reason is worth stating rather than papering over.

BLS does collect wages by state and by metropolitan area through the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. What it no longer publishes is a per-occupation web page that shows them. The address that used to hold the state and metro tables for code 25-2021 now resolves to an index of downloadable files - National, State, and Metropolitan and nonmetropolitan, listed by year back to 1997. The numbers are real. They are spreadsheets.

That has a consequence for anyone comparing state rankings on the open web: each one is somebody's re-publication of one of those files, and the vintage is usually not printed on the page. A ranking built from the May 2023 file and a ranking built from the May 2025 file will disagree with each other, and neither will tell you which it used. If you need state figures for a High School Teacher role, download the file BLS names and read the year off the file itself.

The employer matters more than the grade

Median annual wage by employer type, May 2025

Kindergarten and elementary school teachers. Local public schools pay the most in both occupations; child daycare services the least.

Elementary - local public schools		$65,260
Kindergarten - local public schools		$63,890
Elementary - private schools		$58,140
Kindergarten - private schools		$51,810
Kindergarten - child daycare services		$46,920

Here is the claim this post will defend: which employer signs the contract moves teacher pay more than which grade is taught. The evidence sits in the by-industry table BLS publishes under each of these occupations, and it points the same way in all of them.

Take a kindergarten teacher. In local public schools the median was $63,890 in May 2025. In child daycare services, working with children of the same age, it was $46,920. The grade did not change; the employer did. Set that against the whole distance between the elementary median of $63,970 and the high school median of $72,040, and the sector gap inside kindergarten alone is the larger of the two.

The pattern repeats one band up. Middle school teachers in state-run elementary and secondary schools had a median of $73,690, against $65,290 in local schools, $60,220 in private schools and $58,330 in religious, grantmaking, civic and professional organizations. For high school teachers the local figure was $74,190 against $61,810 in private schools. So a High School Teacher weighing a private-school offer against a public district is making a bigger financial decision than a teacher choosing between ninth grade and fourth.

Special education is the third confirmation, and the cleanest, because the specialty holds constant while the employer changes. Its median in local public schools was $69,470 in May 2025, against $61,290 in private schools - a gap of $8,180, running the same direction as every other occupation on this list. Three separate BLS pages, one pattern.

What the by-industry table does not tell you is why. BLS reports the wage and not the terms behind it - contract length, class size, benefits, pension eligibility, or whether the employer requires a license at all. On that last one the Handbook is explicit: all states require public school teachers to be licensed or certified in the grade level they will teach, while "those who teach in private schools typically are not required to be licensed." That difference alone changes who is standing in each pool, and a median calculated over a pool with no licensing gate is not measuring the same labor market.

What the median hides

BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 estimates.

Read the first column, then the last. The floor is nearly identical across all five occupations, sitting between $46,990 and $49,230, while the top decile clears $100,000 in every one of them. Teaching pay is not flat, whatever the shorthand says. It is a long climb from a narrow starting point - a spread of more than $54,000 between the tenth and ninetieth percentile in every one of these occupations. What the table cannot tell you is what moves a teacher up it: BLS publishes no estimate by years of experience, and the by-industry figures above suggest the employer is doing more of that work than the grade level on the certificate.

One detail in the BLS figure changes how the annual number should be read. The Handbook describes the schedule plainly: "Many teachers work a traditional 10-month school year and have a 2-month break during the summer," with a short midwinter break, and it notes that some teachers work during the summer and that districts on a year-round calendar run nine weeks on and three weeks off instead. So the $72,040 median is an annual figure earned most often under a contract written across ten months. What BLS does not publish is an hourly equivalent, or a count of the unpaid evening and weekend hours the same section describes - so the $72,040 cannot be converted into a rate, in either direction, from anything on that page.

The estimates also carry no step-and-lane schedule - the grid of years of service against degree level that a district's bargaining agreement sets out. That grid, not a national median, is the document that produces an actual offer. BLS cannot say where a particular district sits in the national distribution; the agreement can, and it is a public record.

Are there jobs, or just a shortage story?

High school teachers: size, churn and growth

1,087,500Jobs held in 2025

63,500Openings projected per year

0%Projected employment change, 2025-35

Those three numbers belong together, because each one on its own misleads. Employment of high school teachers is projected to show little or no change from 2025 to 2035, a numeric change of −2,500 jobs across the entire decade. BLS nonetheless projects about 63,500 openings a year in the occupation. Those openings are replacement rather than growth - teachers retiring, and teachers leaving the classroom for something else.

For someone applying, that is better news than a flat projection sounds. An occupation with no net growth and heavy turnover still posts vacancies every hiring cycle; the kindergarten and elementary group is projected at about 99,400 openings a year on the same basis, from a 2025 base of 1,530,500 jobs. The limit of the projection is that openings appear where the leavers were, and a national figure cannot say which states, which districts or which subjects those are.

The middle grades tell the same story in miniature: 630,100 jobs in 2025, a projected change of −2,600 over the decade, and about 38,800 openings a year regardless. Special education adds roughly 37,100 a year against a projected change of −300. Add the four Handbook occupations and BLS is projecting roughly 238,800 openings a year across American classrooms - none of which shows up in the growth column, because none of it is growth. A reader who takes "0 percent" as "no jobs" has read the wrong row.

What special education pays

More than general classroom teaching at every grade band. BLS breaks the special education median of $67,170 into specialties, and each one sits above the general occupation covering the same children.

BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 estimates. General classroom medians are the elementary, middle school and high school teacher figures.

The premium is small - one to two thousand dollars at the midpoint, not a different pay grade - and it is not attached to a shrinking pool. The occupation held 584,100 jobs in 2025 against a projected change of −300 over the decade, with about 37,100 openings a year. What the table does not show is the caseload, the paperwork or the second certification behind the specialty, none of which BLS collects.

Does the extra degree pay for itself?

O*NET's survey of people doing the work reports that 78 percent of respondents for elementary school teachers said a bachelor's degree is required and 22 percent said a master's. For secondary school teachers, 77 percent said bachelor's, with 8 percent naming a post-baccalaureate certificate and a further 8 percent a post-master's certificate. Both occupations sit in Job Zone Four, considerable preparation needed.

That is the entry requirement, not the pay lever. A master's shows up in teacher pay conversations because of the lane column on district schedules - the horizontal axis that pays for coursework past the bachelor's. Neither BLS nor O*NET publishes what a district pays for crossing into that lane, and there is no national figure for it at all. The number exists in one place: the district's own salary schedule, which is a public document. Ask for it before enrolling in the program, not after.

If you are applying for this role

Three specifics, in the order they matter.

Search the titles districts actually post. O*NET's related-occupations list for 25-2021.00 includes Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education; Middle School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education; Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education; Special Education Teachers at each grade band; Teaching Assistants; and Tutors. Those are the formal titles districts and state job banks file postings under, so a keyword search on one of them will not surface the postings filed under the others.

Expect a first offer below the median, not at it. The lowest 10 percent of elementary school teachers earned under $47,960 and the median was $63,970. BLS does not publish the median by years of experience, so nobody can tell you exactly where step one falls - but a district schedule runs upward from a starting step, and an Elementary School Teacher opening a first offer well under $63,970 is looking at the bottom of a grid rather than a verdict on the application.

Ask which step and lane the offer lands on, and how long the contract runs. Ten months and twelve months are different jobs at the same annual number. The step a district credits for prior teaching is a line in a published schedule, not an opinion - ask which step, and ask to see the grid it came off.

Teaching applications are long ones - certification numbers, transcripts, references, and the same employment history retyped into a district portal that looks nothing like the last district's. When you are applying across six districts in one hiring season, HeroApply fills those forms from your resume so the time goes into the cover letter instead.