Education Teachers, Postsecondary
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is California, at $111,850. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Louisiana comes out ahead, worth $74,249. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for education teachers, postsecondary: California leads at $111,850 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Louisiana to $74,249 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
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
$75,350
People doing it
60,830
Highest paid
$111,850
CA
Best off, really
$74,249
LA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$39,530
Highest tenth
$126,860
Lowest, really
$36,684
HI
States with data
49
National average
$79,350
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.34%
LA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $36,684 to $74,249.
- This is a small job: about 60,830 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 49 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $75,350. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, California pays most.
- Interstate variation in education teachers, postsecondary pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $36,684 to $74,249, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 60,830 workers, education teachers, postsecondary is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for education 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: Education Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $39,530 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $75,350 |
| Top tenth earn over | $126,860 |
| This salary | $75,350 |
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 Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
$75,350around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $39,530 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $75,350 |
| Top tenth | $126,860 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Education Teachers, Postsecondary, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | New Hampshire · $49,250 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $111,850 |
| Spread | $62,600 |
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 | $68,280 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $70,265 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| LA | $83,710 | $65,595 | $74,249 |
| CA | $111,850 | $81,206 | $72,132 |
| ND | $77,540 | $63,127 | $71,271 |
| AR | $74,500 | $58,943 | $68,136 |
| NE | $78,950 | $61,483 | $68,030 |
| MI | $79,910 | $61,901 | $65,724 |
| TN | $72,390 | $59,756 | $64,591 |
| NV | $74,240 | $61,058 | $62,959 |
| VT | $78,100 | $60,729 | $62,844 |
| WI | $74,790 | $58,460 | $62,794 |
| UT | $77,090 | $59,632 | $62,770 |
| AZ | $78,520 | $62,508 | $61,825 |
| MT | $70,320 | $55,688 | $61,708 |
| RI | $80,030 | $62,550 | $61,679 |
| MN | $78,950 | $60,526 | $61,500 |
| WY | $66,350 | $55,492 | $61,082 |
| ME | $77,050 | $59,154 | $60,922 |
| PA | $74,910 | $59,229 | $60,748 |
| SD | $63,350 | $53,082 | $60,255 |
| CT | $80,620 | $61,862 | $59,661 |
| NC | $70,050 | $55,824 | $59,299 |
| VA | $77,060 | $59,371 | $58,930 |
| MD | $78,820 | $60,900 | $58,577 |
| TX | $68,280 | $56,865 | $58,518 |
| NY | $82,020 | $62,699 | $58,256 |
| NM | $64,830 | $52,390 | $57,962 |
| IN | $66,150 | $53,410 | $57,938 |
| MO | $65,910 | $52,978 | $57,734 |
| SC | $66,690 | $53,641 | $57,568 |
| ID | $65,720 | $52,356 | $57,267 |
| WA | $75,170 | $61,712 | $56,845 |
| WV | $63,270 | $51,009 | $56,820 |
| MA | $79,980 | $61,417 | $56,742 |
| MS | $61,860 | $49,502 | $56,709 |
| IA | $62,090 | $50,322 | $56,690 |
| AL | $63,730 | $50,639 | $56,284 |
| OH | $62,400 | $51,319 | $55,895 |
| DC | $80,810 | $61,779 | $55,756 |
| NJ | $77,600 | $60,668 | $55,719 |
| OK | $60,880 | $48,858 | $55,341 |
| KS | $63,010 | $49,581 | $55,112 |
| KY | $61,450 | $49,522 | $54,740 |
| CO | $66,870 | $53,639 | $52,908 |
| OR | $73,880 | $54,890 | $52,416 |
| GA | $62,510 | $49,886 | $51,589 |
| FL | $63,640 | $53,315 | $51,536 |
| IL | $61,560 | $48,741 | $49,306 |
| NH | $49,250 | $41,752 | $39,634 |
| HI | $49,800 | $39,842 | $36,684 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $75,350, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- One filer, no dependants, nothing paid into a pension before tax — that is the household behind every take-home figure for this job. It is the simplest case on purpose, so the states can be compared against each other rather than against each other's family circumstances. City income taxes are not counted. On that household, California keeps the most at $81,206.
- Levelling out prices for this job is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Hawaii sits at the bottom on $36,684.
- These are distribution medians for education teachers, postsecondary, with a national value of $75,350. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- The household modeled for education teachers, postsecondary is a single filer, standard deduction, no dependants, no pre-tax contributions. Holding the household constant is what makes the interstate comparison meaningful; it also means the absolute figures overstate liability for most real filers. On that basis California retains the most, $81,206. Municipal and school-district income taxes are not included in any state.
- The price deflation applied to education teachers, postsecondary uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Hawaii at $36,684. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $36,684 — and the two source series are dated independently.