This report updates a two-decade body of research tracking the teacher pay penalty—the growing pay gap between public school teachers and their college-educated peers.1 Because public school teachers must attain at least a bachelor’s degree to teach in the U.S., this research compares weekly earnings of public school teachers (elementary, middle, and secondary)2 with those of college graduates who chose other careers. Documenting the widening divergence between the wages of teachers and their college-educated counterparts over time allows for a historical analysis of an issue that is critical to the future of the United States: the quality of our education. If teachers’ compensation doesn’t catch up with that of similarly educated and experienced professionals, schools will struggle to retain and attract qualified workers into the profession.

Data and relevant information

In analyzing differences in pay between public school teachers and other college graduates, I use two sources of data, both from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).3 First, I use Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Groups (CPS-ORG) data for the weekly wage analyses (BLS 2025a). I focus on weekly wages, rather than weekly hours worked or the length of the work year, to account for the “summers off” issue that affects teachers but not other college graduates.4 The sample is restricted to full-time workers (working at least 35 hours per week) aged between 18 and 64, with at least a bachelor’s degree, since teachers today need at least a bachelor’s degree to teach. Note that the 2025 annual data do not include October due to the U.S. federal government shutdown.

The sample is further limited to those who reported their wage information directly (those who didn’t respond and whose wages were estimated by BLS are excluded).5 To preserve data confidentiality, the BLS records weekly wages only up to a defined threshold, so the wage amounts above this threshold aren’t specifically identifiable in the data. This is called top-coding. Historically, the threshold was rarely updated. As a result, a growing share of workers are assigned top-coded wages that are below their actual wages, which has generated a growing understatement of college graduate wages relative to those of teachers. EPI replaces original top-coded values with Pareto-distribution implied means above the original CPS top-code separately for men and women.6 CPS demographic variables (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, state of residence, marital status, age) are also used for the regression analyses.

The BLS’s National Compensation Survey’s Employer Costs for Employee Compensation program (BLS 2025b) is the second data source. Specifically, I pull data on employer costs per hour worked for detailed categories of compensation for “primary, secondary, and special education school teachers” in the public sector, and the same data for “civilian professionals,” which is the broadest category available that largely corresponds to college graduates. “Benefits,” in this analysis, refer to employer costs for health and life insurance, retirement plans, and payroll taxes (covering Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation).

The remaining components of compensation are “W-2 wages,” a measure that corresponds to the wages captured in the CPS data used above. W-2 wages are the wages reported to employees and to the Internal Revenue Service. They include “direct wages,” defined by the BLS as “regular payments from the employer to the employee as compensation for straight-time hourly work, or for any salaried work performed,” and other wage items, including “supplemental pay.” Supplemental pay includes premium pay for overtime, bonus pay, profit-sharing, and paid leave.

Findings

I present the results of this research in four sections. First, I examine trends in the simple (i.e., not regression-adjusted, but adjusted for inflation) average weekly wages for public school teachers and other college graduates from 1979 through 2025. Second, I report annual estimates of the relative national teacher weekly wage gap. The relative gap is estimated using standard regression techniques to control for systematic differences in age, education, state of residence, and other factors known to affect wage rates. Third, I analyze the regression-adjusted estimates of the teacher wage gap for each state and the District of Columbia. Lastly, I factor in nonwage benefits to estimate a total compensation penalty that accounts for the estimated teacher wage penalty, along with the teacher “benefits advantage”—teachers’ relatively larger share of compensation coming from benefits, like health insurance or retirement plans. I use these figures to estimate a total compensation differential at the national level (which is not possible to calculate for each state).

Simple level differences: Weekly wage trends

The average weekly wages of public school teachers and other college graduates are shown in Figure A. These data are national annual averages adjusted only for inflation (i.e., not regression-adjusted). It is important to keep in mind that real improvements in living standards require wages to outpace inflation, which has not been the case for teachers—but has for other college graduates. 

Figure A shows that the inflation-adjusted average weekly wages for teachers were relatively flat from 1996 through 2021, indicating that teacher wages, on average, were just keeping up with the rate of inflation. By 2025, teacher wages were 6.2% less than they were on average in 1996. The average weekly wages of other college graduates also experienced a stretch of stagnation, but for a shorter time span (2002–2014), after which real increases ensued. Since 1996, the wages of other college graduates increased by 28.8%.

Illustrated in Figure A is a noteworthy fall in teacher wages that occurred in 2022 due to high rates of inflation. A similar decline did not occur in the wages of other college graduates as private-sector wages can be more responsive to economic conditions, whereas that is not possible with public-sector teacher pay. At the time, I posited that a new, lower trend in teacher wages would likely occur post-2022. History has shown that teacher pay has barely kept up with moderate rates of inflation—as indicated by the flat trend in Figure A—and pay increases following 2022 seemed unlikely to be large enough to recoup that significant decline. Thus far, they have not.

Addressing the long-term stagnation of teacher wages requires that future increases in pay meet and exceed rates of inflation in the future to recover the decline in wages since 2021, and to drive an increasing trend in teacher wages to close the gap relative to other college graduates.

Relative differences: Regression-adjusted trends

The discussion of weekly wages shown in Figure A is centered around simple averages—meaning, they are not adjusted for fundamental differences that may exist between the samples of teachers and other college graduates. In this section, I move to regression adjusted estimation, which helps to account for ways the two groups may differ fundamentally on factors that typically affect pay—such as age, educational attainment, race/ethnicity, and state of residence. For instance, all else being equal, one would expect experienced workers to earn more than younger workers who are just starting out in their careers. Controlling for age within a regression model accounts for such differences across the two samples. Thus, I employ standard regression techniques to estimate weekly wages of public school teachers relative to other similarly situated college graduates working in other professions, which can provide a more apples-to-apples comparison of earnings.7

Figure B reports regression-based results that show how much less (or more) teachers earn in weekly wages relative to other college graduates. A weekly wage “penalty” for teachers is reported when the regression estimates suggest that teachers, all else equal, are paid less than other college graduates. Teachers’ weekly wage penalties are reported as negative numbers in Figure B. When teachers are paid relatively more, the reported gap is positive and is referred to as a “premium.” The regression analysis provides estimates for all teachers (which includes a gender control), as well as separately for women and men. 

The historical trends in relative teacher pay are depicted in Figure B. The overall trend represents three decades of teacher wages faring ever more poorly compared with other similarly qualified professionals. In the pre-1994 period, the teacher wage gap averaged 8.7%, but the relative gap worsened considerably starting in the mid-1990s. The teaching penalty hit a record of 26.9% in 2024, before slightly improving to an estimated 25.2% in 2025. However, this slight improvement is unlikely to be sustained, given that similar improvements throughout this long series have historically proven temporary.

In sum, teachers earned on average 74.8 cents on the dollar in 2025 compared with what similar college graduates earned working in other professions—much less than the relative 93.9 cents on the dollar that teachers earned in 1996.

Separating the analysis by gender shows that in the period from 1979 through 1993, the relative female teacher weekly wage (i.e., comparing female teachers with other female college graduates) was at a premium that averaged 3.3%. But starting in 1996, the female teacher wage gap quickly went from a small premium to an ever-increasing penalty—landing at a 20.0% penalty in 2025.

My previous research (using decennial Census data) confirmed that, over a longer timeframe, the relative wage estimates for female teachers moved from significant premiums to large penalties. For example, I documented that relative female teacher earnings were at a 14.7% premium in 1960, which lessened to 10.4% in 1970 and to near parity in 1980 (pre-1979 years not shown in Figure B). Using the estimates from 2025, the cumulative change has been a 34.7 percentage-point deterioration in the relative wage of female teachers since 1960.8

There is an important story behind the declining relative wages experienced by female teachers. Historically, the teaching profession relied on a somewhat captive labor pool of educated women who had few employment opportunities. This is thankfully no longer the case, but increased opportunity costs are a part of the story, and they are reflected in these results. Expanding opportunities for women enabled them to earn more as they entered occupations and professions from which they were once barred.

The wages of male teachers have long been outpaced by those garnered by male college graduates who chose other professions. My previously documented estimates going back to 1960 have never been even close to parity. But similar to their female counterparts, the relative male teacher penalty grew considerably over time—from 20.5% in 1960 to 34.5% in 2025.9

The historically large and worsening male teacher penalty partly explains why about 3 in 4 teachers today are women—a ratio that has not changed much since 1960. The pay penalty experienced by male teachers is unfortunate given the recent statistics and reporting of boys struggling in school. Performing poorly in school is associated with problems encountered later in life—including addiction, mental and physical health issues, and involvement with the criminal justice system.10 Further, Thomas Dee (2010) found that a teacher’s gender has large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that today a much smaller share of college-educated women choose the teaching profession over expanding opportunities with better pay—even as three-quarters of teachers are women. Moreover, the very large, persisting male teaching penalty goes a long way in explaining why men who may want to teach are compelled to choose other career paths, which are on average much more lucrative.

Relative teacher weekly wage penalties by state

To this point, I have reported the relative teacher wage gaps for the country as a whole, but there is a lot of state-by-state variation. To produce regression estimates by state, I pool six years (2020–2025) of CPS data to assure ample sample sizes for each state. Again, I compare public school teachers with nonteacher college graduates within each state and estimate regression-adjusted weekly wage gaps for each state and the District of Columbia.

As in previous reports, Figure C shows that in no state does the relative (i.e., regression-adjusted) weekly wage for teachers equal or surpass that of their nonteaching college graduate counterparts. The results in Figure C are sorted from the largest (40.7%) to the smallest (10.4%) penalties across the U.S.

The teaching penalty was at least 25% in 25 states, and at least 30% in 11 states. Colorado’s 40.7% teacher penalty is the first time in this research series that a penalty was estimated at or above 40%; on average, teachers in Colorado earned 59.3 cents on the dollar compared with similar college graduates in 2025.

The map in Figure D illustrates the state penalties reported in Figure C.

Adding benefits to the analysis

This section adds a nationwide analysis of benefits to see how they affect total compensation between teachers and other college graduates. Teachers are thought to have a “benefits advantage,” which refers to the understanding that, on average in the U.S., teachers generally receive a larger share of their total compensation in benefits—such as health insurance, other insurance, and retirement plans—compared with employment benefits received by other professionals.

Keep in mind that a larger share of total compensation via benefits means a smaller wage share, given that total compensation is made up of these two components. Here, I calculate how the relatively more generous benefits package for teachers partially offsets the large teacher wage penalty.

The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) series measures the average employer cost per employee hour worked for total compensation, wages and salaries, benefits, and costs as a share of total compensation. I compare benefits packages of primary, secondary, and special education public school teachers with those of comparable workers (specifically, workers in professional occupations).11 Table 1 shows a summary of my calculations.

The first two columns in Table 1 under “W-2 wage share of compensation” report the share of W-2 wages that make up total compensation for professionals in all occupations and for state and local K–12 public school teachers. The shares of compensation for W-2 wages and benefits add up to 100. The W-2 shares allow for an examination of how important wages are relative to benefits in the total compensation package.

In 2025, W-2 wages made up 69.4% of teachers’ total compensation, while the share was 79.3% for nonteaching professionals. That means that for every dollar of teachers’ total compensation, 69.4 cents went to wages, and 30.6 cents went to benefits. For professionals, 79.3 cents went to wages, and 20.7 cents went to benefits. Therefore, for every dollar of total compensation, public school teachers receive more in benefits than other professionals, but less in wages. I refer to this as the “benefits advantage.”12

The right-side columns in Table 1 provide the information needed to assess total compensation on average for the United States from the “public school teachers” vantage point. The “wage penalty” column reports the teacher wage penalty estimates from Figure B, followed by the benefits advantage calculation for teachers. Combining the two gives us a measure of how teachers compare with other professionals on total compensation, which is reported in the last column. Per usual, the benefits advantage for teachers partially offsets their estimated relative wage disadvantage, but teachers are still left with a significant total compensation gap of 14.5% in 2025—down somewhat from 16.7% in 2024. This slight change was due to a 0.5 percentage point relative increase in the teacher benefits advantage, and a 1.7 percentage point decrease in the relative teacher wage penalty.

As reported in Table 1, the teacher total compensation gap over the last decade has varied in a rather narrow range from 10.2% in 2019 to a high of 17.0% in 2022. Generally, over the long run, the teacher wage penalty has been worsening as the teacher benefits advantage has grown larger—albeit at a slower rate than the wage penalty. Of course, even if the teacher benefits advantage exceeded the large teacher wage penalty, the standard of living for teachers would likely fall as they would have little in the way of earnings to make ends meet.

How much further can teacher pay fall behind?

Teaching is one of the most consequential professions—not just for kids and their families, but for the country as a whole. Educating each and every child, regardless of means, is among our highest ideals as a country, and the future of the U.S. economy depends on it. The highest standard is still worth fighting for, even as we have always fallen short of the ideal.13

Given the critical role that teachers have on student outcomes (Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff 2014), I have been updating this series on teacher pay for over 20 years. After Larry Mishel, Sean Corcoran, and I wrote two books on the subject in 2004 and 2008, it was not obvious that the trends we depicted would continue to get worse—but overall, they have.

The nearly 50-year trends documented in this paper have no doubt already taken a serious toll on the teaching profession. That toll shows up in teacher retention, recruitment, and staffing (Fortin and Fawcett 2023; NCES 2023); college students forgoing teaching careers citing pay as a main barrier (Croft, Guffy, and Vitale 2018); parents actively steering their children into professions that pay better than teaching (PDK 2019); fast-tracking credentials in response to permanent teacher shortages (Povich 2023); the heavy use of unqualified teachers (Tamez-Robledo 2023; Lopez and Van Overschelde 2024); and the reliance on unqualified substitute teachers (Franco and Kemper Patrick 2023).

I have long asserted that providing teachers a standard of living commensurate with that of similar nonteacher professionals is not simply a matter of fairness—teacher pay is a central issue in public education, and thus a matter of national consequence. The quality of a public education hinges on our willingness to fairly and sufficiently invest in both schools and teachers, including the full public school workforce, its infrastructure, and essential wrap-around services (Wething and Bivens 2025).

It would be willful blindness to ignore the toll that the decades-long teacher pay penalty has had on the quality of public education. Regrettably, policymakers have failed to deliver sustained and effective interventions capable of mitigating—let alone substantially improving—the trends outlined in this long-running series. This is an unfortunate reality, especially in a country as wealthy as the United States, with more than enough resources for its public schools to be the envy of the world.

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Notes

1. See Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2004, 2008; Allegretto and Tojerow 2014; Allegretto and Mishel 2016, 2018, 2019; and Allegretto 2023 and 2024.

2. The teacher sample does not include kindergarten or pre-kindergarten; if included, the teacher pay penalties would be even larger. 

3. Allegretto and Mishel 2019, Appendix A provides a comprehensive discussion of the data and methodologies that were used to produce our teacher weekly wage and total compensation estimates. 

4. In Allegretto and Mishel 2019, we provide evidence that teachers work weekly hours similar to those of other professionals.

5. Our earlier work documents that BLS’s imputation method overstates teacher earnings, which is not the case for the other college graduate sample (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2008, 9).

6. For more about top-code adjustments, see Economic Policy Institute 2026b.

7. The wage model includes controls for both public and private school teachers. The weekly wage penalty estimates are based on the coefficient on the public school teacher indicator. Regression for all teachers includes a gender control. The percentage gap is calculated as (eb -1) x 100. See Allegretto and Mishel 2019, Appendix A, for specification details.

8. See Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2008 for 1960, 1970, and 1980 estimates using decennial censuses.

9. The 1960 results are not shown in Figure B. They can be found in Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2008, 7.

10. See Abrams 2023.

11. The ECEC provides compensation data for a narrower category of “primary, secondary, and special education school teachers” and for a broader category of “teachers.” I analyze the narrower category, which closely matches the definition of teachers in the CPS-ORG data, using data limited to state and local public-sector workers. The inclusion of kindergarten and special education teachers in the benefits analysis does not produce any more substantial differences than if they were excluded (as they are in the CPS sample used to estimate the wage penalty). Greater methodological detail is provided in Appendix A of Allegretto and Mishel 2019.

12. My analysis accounts for differences in annual weeks worked, as it is based on the usual weekly wages of teachers and other college graduates, not hourly wages or annual earnings. One reason health and pension costs are higher for teachers is that teacher health benefits are provided for a full year, while teacher salaries are for less than a full year.

13. See Allegretto, Garcia, and Weiss 2022. This paper describes inequities in public education funding. We also argue that the federal government should play a larger role in funding public education.

References

Abrams, Zara. 2023. Boys Are Facing Key Challenges in School. Inside the Effort to Support Their Success. American Psychological Association, April 2023.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. 2004. How Does Teacher Pay Compare? Methodological Challenges and Answers. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. 2008. The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., Emma García, and Elaine Weiss. 2022. Public Education Funding in the U.S. Needs an Overhaul: How a Larger Federal Role Would Boost Equity and Shield Children from Disinvestment During Downturns. Economic Policy Institute, July 2022.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., and Lawrence Mishel. 2019. The Teacher Weekly Wage Penalty Hit 21.4 Percent in 2018, a Record High. Economic Policy Institute, April 2019.

Allegretto, Sylvia A., and Ilan Tojerow. 2014. Teacher Staffing and Pay Differences: Public and Private Schools. Monthly Labor Review. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2014.

Blad, Evie. 2024. Teachers Report Lower Pay, More Stress Than Workers in Other Fields. Education Week, June 19, 2024, sec. Teaching & Learning, Teaching Profession.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2025a. Current Population Survey.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2025b. Employer Costs for Employee Compensation Historical Listing: National Compensation Survey, data tables. Accessed July 12, 2026.

Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff. 2014. Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood. American Economic Review 104, no. 9 (September 2014): 2633–2679.

Croft, Michelle, Gretchen Guffy, and Dan Vitale. 2018. Encouraging More High School Students to Consider Teaching. ACT Research & Policy, June 2018.

Dee, Thomas S. 2010 The Why Chromosome. Education Next, January 26, 2010.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2026a. Current Population Survey Extracts, Version 2026.7.8, https://microdata.epi.org. Accessed July 6, 2026.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 2026b. “Methodology: Wage Variables.” EPI Microdata Extracts documentation.

Fortin, Jacey, and Eliza Fawcett. 2023. How Bad Is the Teacher Shortage? Depends Where You Live. New York Times, August 29, 2023.

Franco, Marguerite, and Susan Kemper Patrick. 2023. State Teacher Shortages: Teaching Positions Left Vacant or Filled by Teachers Without Full Certification. Learning Policy Institute, July 2023.

Lopez, Minda, and James P. Van Overschelde. 2024. Unlicensed Teachers Now Dominate New Teacher Hires in Rural Texas Schools. The Dallas Observer, June 20, 2024.

Merod, Anna. 2023. Low Pay, Long Hours Top Reasons Teachers Consider Leaving. K-12 Dive, September 12, 2023.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2023. Most Public Schools Face Challenges in Hiring Teachers and Other Personnel Entering the 2023-24 Academic Year. October 2023.

Phi Delta Kappan (PDK). 2018. Teaching: Respect but Dwindling Appeal. The 50th Annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. Supplement to Kappan magazine.

Povich, Elaine S. 2023. Plagued By Teacher Shortages, Some States Turn to Fast-Track Credentialing. Stateline, July 24, 2023.

Steiner, Elizabeth D., Ashley Woo, and Sy Doan. 2023. All Work and No Pay — Teachers’ Perceptions of Their Pay and Hours Worked: Findings from the 2023 State of the American Teacher Survey. RAND Corporation, September 12, 2023.

Tamez-Robledo, Nadia. 2023. These States Have the Most ‘Underqualified’ Teachers Stepping in to Fill Open Positions. EdSurge, April 4, 2023.

Wething, Hilary and Josh Bivens. 2025. U.S. Investment in Public Education is at Risk: Vouchers, State Budget Austerity, and Federal Attacks on the Department of Education Threaten Children’s Futures. Economic Policy Institute, August 2025.