Teacher salaries had a good 2024
They rose by 4% nationally
The average teacher salary rose 4.1% year-over-year, according to the latest national data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The graph below shows the change in teacher salaries (in dark green) versus inflation (the dotted line).
Over the long, long term, average teacher salaries have mostly kept up with inflation, but no more than that. In real terms, the average teacher salary has hovered right around $70,000 for the last three decades.
In more recent years, teacher salaries didn’t keep pace during the inflation boom that plagued much of 2021 and 2022. Thanks to multi-year contracts, teacher salaries are slow to adjust to changing economic conditions, but, as inflation has come down, salaries have started to catch up.
On a cumulative basis, inflation-adjusted salaries are still below where they were pre-pandemic. Still, national averages can be hard to interpret, because they don’t look at the gains of individual teachers. That is, if higher-paid teachers retired and were replaced by lower-paid novices, or if high-paying districts were shrinking while lower-paying districts were growing, that would depress the average even if every single active employee got a raise. Similarly, as schools have added teaching staff, that also depresses the average salary figure.
Still, this is good news for teachers. In future work I’m going to keep unpacking why teachers salaries aren’t rising even more…
I’ll always wonder… if teacher salaries and benefits are so good, why don’t more people enter the profession?
It's important to note that when considering teacher salaries, one must add in health and retirement perks. Addditionally, full-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, including time spent for lesson preparation, test construction and grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities.
Full-time private industry workers work an average of 2,045 hours per year, or about 37% more than public school teachers. This includes time spent working beyond assigned schedules at the workplace and at home.