Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English as a Second Language Instructors
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. California pays this job best, at $102,030. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $66,806 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for adult basic education, adult secondary education, and english as a second language instructors is also the real leader: California at $102,030, holding through tax and through price deflation to $66,806. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$61,540
People doing it
37,310
Highest paid
$102,030
CA
Best off, really
$66,806
CA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$41,810
Highest tenth
$98,030
Lowest, really
$33,182
HI
States with data
50
National average
$65,860
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
112.58%
CA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $33,182 up to $66,806.
- Just 37,310 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $61,540. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, California pays most.
- The nominal spread for adult basic education, adult secondary education, and english as a second language instructors approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $33,182 to $66,806, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- 37,310 are employed nationally in adult basic education, adult secondary education, and english as a second language instructors — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for adult basic education, adult secondary education, and english as a second language instructors in 50 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English as a Second Language Instructors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $41,810 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $61,540 |
| Top tenth earn over | $98,030 |
| This salary | $61,540 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English as a Second Language Instructors
The national median for this job
$61,540around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $41,810 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $61,540 |
| Top tenth | $98,030 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English as a Second Language Instructors, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | South Dakota · $35,760 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $102,030 |
| Spread | $66,270 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $49,490 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $50,929 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| CA | $102,030 | $75,211 | $66,806 |
| LA | $66,870 | $54,253 | $61,411 |
| DE | $78,600 | $60,169 | $60,621 |
| ND | $63,820 | $53,459 | $60,357 |
| MN | $76,800 | $59,160 | $60,111 |
| WV | $65,050 | $52,357 | $58,323 |
| NJ | $81,100 | $62,908 | $57,776 |
| WI | $64,980 | $51,989 | $55,843 |
| NY | $78,010 | $60,094 | $55,836 |
| TN | $60,340 | $50,663 | $54,762 |
| SC | $62,940 | $50,895 | $54,622 |
| CT | $72,180 | $56,389 | $54,383 |
| WA | $69,990 | $58,068 | $53,488 |
| VT | $62,500 | $50,384 | $52,139 |
| IN | $58,660 | $47,612 | $51,649 |
| NH | $64,440 | $53,958 | $51,220 |
| MI | $59,900 | $48,015 | $50,980 |
| VA | $64,540 | $51,087 | $50,708 |
| MT | $56,500 | $45,679 | $50,617 |
| AZ | $61,750 | $50,655 | $50,101 |
| IL | $62,370 | $49,352 | $49,923 |
| WY | $52,060 | $44,010 | $48,444 |
| ME | $58,880 | $46,836 | $48,236 |
| FL | $58,920 | $49,522 | $47,870 |
| PA | $57,230 | $46,407 | $47,597 |
| OK | $51,840 | $42,001 | $47,574 |
| OR | $65,700 | $49,771 | $47,528 |
| MS | $49,900 | $40,371 | $46,248 |
| RI | $57,690 | $46,791 | $46,139 |
| MO | $51,770 | $42,281 | $46,077 |
| MD | $59,950 | $47,866 | $46,040 |
| KS | $52,030 | $41,371 | $45,986 |
| MA | $62,290 | $49,436 | $45,673 |
| DC | $62,940 | $50,108 | $45,222 |
| NC | $51,810 | $42,251 | $44,881 |
| NM | $49,170 | $40,541 | $44,853 |
| IA | $48,010 | $39,543 | $44,547 |
| ID | $50,040 | $40,588 | $44,395 |
| NE | $49,040 | $40,056 | $44,321 |
| AL | $48,870 | $39,353 | $43,740 |
| TX | $49,490 | $41,945 | $43,165 |
| OH | $47,190 | $39,516 | $43,040 |
| NV | $48,930 | $41,495 | $42,787 |
| UT | $49,680 | $39,887 | $41,986 |
| AR | $43,240 | $35,782 | $41,363 |
| CO | $51,170 | $41,752 | $41,183 |
| KY | $44,990 | $36,872 | $40,757 |
| GA | $47,540 | $38,605 | $39,923 |
| SD | $35,760 | $30,913 | $35,091 |
| HI | $44,600 | $36,039 | $33,182 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $61,540 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for this job assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In California, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $75,211.
- The price adjustment for this job uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $33,182. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for adult basic education, adult secondary education, and english as a second language instructors are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $61,540. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for adult basic education, adult secondary education, and english as a second language instructors assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $75,211, in California. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms figures for adult basic education, adult secondary education, and english as a second language instructors deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.