Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. Delaware pays this job best, at $103,320. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $76,499 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for art, drama, and music teachers, postsecondary is also the real leader: Delaware at $103,320, holding through tax and through price deflation to $76,499. 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
$78,620
People doing it
93,560
Highest paid
$103,320
DE
Best off, really
$76,499
DE, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$47,570
Highest tenth
$163,350
Lowest, really
$46,052
NV
States with data
49
National average
$94,700
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
99.25%
DE, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $46,052 to $76,499.
- Just 93,560 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 49 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $78,620. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Delaware pays most.
- Geographic dispersion in art, drama, and music teachers, postsecondary is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $46,052 to $76,499 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 93,560 are employed nationally in art, drama, and music teachers, postsecondary — 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 art, drama, and music teachers, postsecondary in 49 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: Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $47,570 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $78,620 |
| Top tenth earn over | $163,350 |
| This salary | $78,620 |
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 Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
$78,620around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $47,570 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $78,620 |
| Top tenth | $163,350 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Nevada · $52,870 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Delaware · $103,320 |
| Spread | $50,450 |
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 | $77,560 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $79,815 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DE | $103,320 | $75,928 | $76,499 |
| VT | $97,980 | $73,403 | $75,959 |
| RI | $97,580 | $74,195 | $73,162 |
| LA | $78,710 | $62,227 | $70,437 |
| IA | $77,740 | $61,178 | $68,919 |
| NY | $98,850 | $73,579 | $68,366 |
| MI | $82,990 | $63,937 | $67,885 |
| OH | $78,050 | $62,308 | $67,865 |
| MT | $78,420 | $60,929 | $67,515 |
| NM | $76,240 | $60,047 | $66,434 |
| CA | $99,410 | $73,612 | $65,386 |
| NE | $75,200 | $59,015 | $65,300 |
| TX | $77,560 | $63,393 | $65,236 |
| IN | $76,050 | $60,117 | $65,214 |
| MO | $75,960 | $59,635 | $64,989 |
| DC | $96,900 | $71,731 | $64,737 |
| WI | $77,560 | $60,244 | $64,711 |
| WV | $73,280 | $57,915 | $64,514 |
| TN | $72,030 | $59,503 | $64,317 |
| GA | $79,870 | $61,632 | $63,736 |
| ND | $67,190 | $56,047 | $63,279 |
| MD | $85,590 | $65,341 | $62,849 |
| ME | $79,860 | $60,941 | $62,763 |
| PA | $77,280 | $60,824 | $62,384 |
| ID | $72,300 | $56,714 | $62,034 |
| NC | $73,800 | $58,312 | $61,943 |
| NH | $79,090 | $64,470 | $61,199 |
| MN | $77,760 | $59,770 | $60,731 |
| SD | $63,380 | $53,106 | $60,282 |
| MA | $85,820 | $65,233 | $60,268 |
| WA | $77,950 | $63,668 | $58,647 |
| CT | $78,600 | $60,552 | $58,398 |
| VA | $74,870 | $57,957 | $57,526 |
| AZ | $72,060 | $58,125 | $57,490 |
| KY | $64,440 | $51,820 | $57,280 |
| NJ | $80,100 | $62,268 | $57,188 |
| AR | $60,650 | $49,127 | $56,789 |
| OK | $62,200 | $49,859 | $56,475 |
| AL | $63,540 | $50,495 | $56,124 |
| MS | $60,580 | $48,525 | $55,589 |
| UT | $66,220 | $52,441 | $55,200 |
| CO | $70,060 | $55,743 | $54,983 |
| WY | $59,190 | $49,739 | $54,750 |
| SC | $62,420 | $50,512 | $54,210 |
| OR | $76,770 | $56,671 | $54,116 |
| KS | $61,260 | $48,273 | $53,657 |
| FL | $63,820 | $53,459 | $51,676 |
| IL | $62,960 | $49,797 | $50,373 |
| NV | $52,870 | $44,661 | $46,052 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of this job earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $78,620.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for this job, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is Delaware, at $75,928.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Nevada, on $46,052.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for art, drama, and music teachers, postsecondary, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $78,620, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Retained-pay figures for art, drama, and music teachers, postsecondary model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $75,928, which leads in Delaware.
- Real-terms results for art, drama, and music teachers, postsecondary rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Nevada anchors the distribution at $46,052. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.