Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
What the pay figures show
- Washington comes first for this job on every measure. $166,590 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $115,262 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For education administrators, kindergarten through secondary, Washington's $166,590 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $115,262. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$105,870
People doing it
328,330
Highest paid
$166,590
WA
Best off, really
$115,262
WA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$76,280
Highest tenth
$167,770
Lowest, really
$68,555
NC
States with data
51
National average
$116,100
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.56%
WA, 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 $68,555 to $115,262.
- 328,330 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $105,870. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $105,870. Nothing is missing.
- Geographic dispersion in education administrators, kindergarten through secondary 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 $68,555 to $115,262 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- National employment in education administrators, kindergarten through secondary is 328,330 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- Coverage for education administrators, kindergarten through secondary is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $76,280 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $105,870 |
| Top tenth earn over | $167,770 |
| This salary | $105,870 |
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 Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
The national median for this job
$105,870around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $76,280 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $105,870 |
| Top tenth | $167,770 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $80,650 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $166,590 |
| Spread | $85,940 |
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 | $93,910 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $96,640 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| WA | $166,590 | $125,130 | $115,262 |
| CT | $156,240 | $109,932 | $106,021 |
| UT | $128,880 | $93,620 | $98,546 |
| CA | $159,950 | $109,808 | $97,537 |
| AK | $125,520 | $97,059 | $95,422 |
| DE | $132,710 | $94,445 | $95,156 |
| ND | $107,940 | $83,920 | $94,748 |
| MN | $127,000 | $90,934 | $92,397 |
| WI | $117,010 | $85,655 | $92,006 |
| NY | $138,830 | $98,651 | $91,661 |
| MD | $131,510 | $95,082 | $91,455 |
| WY | $105,480 | $83,035 | $91,400 |
| NE | $110,580 | $82,295 | $91,059 |
| PA | $118,710 | $88,698 | $90,972 |
| NJ | $137,440 | $98,641 | $90,594 |
| NM | $107,720 | $80,664 | $89,244 |
| IA | $104,260 | $78,827 | $88,802 |
| NV | $109,420 | $85,807 | $88,479 |
| RI | $119,980 | $88,889 | $87,652 |
| DC | $137,470 | $96,510 | $87,100 |
| MA | $128,430 | $92,946 | $85,872 |
| OR | $130,050 | $89,299 | $85,274 |
| IL | $113,360 | $83,112 | $84,075 |
| TN | $97,590 | $77,485 | $83,754 |
| KY | $99,920 | $75,744 | $83,725 |
| OH | $99,590 | $76,869 | $83,725 |
| MI | $104,020 | $77,838 | $82,645 |
| HI | $126,760 | $89,716 | $82,604 |
| ID | $101,090 | $75,442 | $82,518 |
| KS | $100,530 | $74,232 | $82,512 |
| MO | $100,400 | $75,680 | $82,474 |
| SC | $102,440 | $76,525 | $82,129 |
| IN | $98,770 | $75,430 | $81,826 |
| AL | $97,480 | $73,329 | $81,504 |
| CO | $110,530 | $82,433 | $81,309 |
| VT | $105,350 | $78,101 | $80,821 |
| SD | $88,390 | $71,012 | $80,609 |
| MT | $95,700 | $72,109 | $79,904 |
| GA | $103,360 | $76,985 | $79,613 |
| NH | $104,910 | $82,634 | $78,441 |
| ME | $102,890 | $75,499 | $77,756 |
| VA | $106,100 | $78,131 | $77,550 |
| AR | $86,330 | $66,828 | $77,250 |
| TX | $93,910 | $74,896 | $77,073 |
| OK | $86,630 | $66,376 | $75,183 |
| AZ | $97,480 | $75,373 | $74,549 |
| FL | $96,490 | $76,711 | $74,151 |
| LA | $83,360 | $65,359 | $73,982 |
| MS | $82,800 | $63,860 | $73,157 |
| WV | $80,650 | $62,763 | $69,913 |
| NC | $83,180 | $64,537 | $68,555 |
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 $105,870.
- 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $125,130.
- 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 — North Carolina anchors the bottom at $68,555. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for education administrators, kindergarten through secondary, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $105,870, 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.
- Take-home calculations for education administrators, kindergarten through secondary 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 $125,130, in Washington. 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 education administrators, kindergarten through secondary 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.