The Inflation Problem for Teachers

Sudden price spikes can leave educators falling behind

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that inflation hit an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the highest it has been since the COVID/ ESSER hike from a few years ago.

They write that, “inflation outpaced year-over-year wage gains in May for the second month in a row. Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings declined 0.7% on the year in May after dropping 0.3% in April… That means households’ purchasing power isn’t keeping up with increases in the cost of things like rent, groceries and gasoline.”

That’s bad news for lots of workers, but it can be particularly painful for teachers. Unlike many private-sector workers, teachers often work under multi-year contracts that lock in salaries well before anyone knows what inflation will be. That can leave them vulnerable to sudden shocks.

Over the long, long-term, the average teacher salary has mostly kept up with inflation, but no more than that. And teacher salaries tend to lag behind inflation increases. Once inflation comes down, teacher salaries have a chance to catch up.

You can see this in the chart below. Using BLS data that also came out this week, I graphed the change in average teacher salaries versus inflation over the last 10 years. Starting from left to right, you can see that teacher salaries were not growing very fast in 2016 and 2017. But then the “Red for Ed” movement started winning larger salary increases in 2018 and 2019, and those kicked in in 2019 and 2020.

And we all remember what happened next. In the wake of COVID and federal stimulus checks, inflation exploded in 2021-2022, and teacher salaries could not keep up.

As inflation came back down though, teacher salaries were once again rising faster than inflation for the second half of 2023, all of 2024, and most of 2025.

My graph only runs through March of this year, and inflation has ticked up noticeably since then thanks to the war with Iran and the rise in gasoline price.

The good news is that teacher salaries have historically caught up once inflation stabilizes. The bad news is that when inflation rises suddenly, teachers often spend months or even years absorbing the hit before salary schedules have a chance to adjust.

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