Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. Washington pays this job best, at $102,350. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $74,458 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for elementary school teachers, except special education is also the real leader: Washington at $102,350, holding through tax and through price deflation to $74,458. 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
$63,970
People doing it
1,388,390
Highest paid
$102,350
WA
Best off, really
$74,458
WA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$47,960
Highest tenth
$104,340
Lowest, really
$44,447
OK
States with data
51
National average
$72,650
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.56%
WA, 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 $44,447 to $74,458.
- About 1,388,390 people in the country do this job. Very few jobs are this big. That is part of why its geography is worth setting out with care.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $63,970 in the middle.
- Interstate variation in elementary school teachers, except special education 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 $44,447 to $74,458, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- 1,388,390 workers are employed nationally in elementary school teachers, except special education. At this scale the occupation's wage geography is a macroeconomic fact as much as a career one, and small per-worker differentials aggregate into substantial regional flows.
- 51 jurisdictions report elementary school teachers, except special education, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $47,960 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $63,970 |
| Top tenth earn over | $104,340 |
| This salary | $63,970 |
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 Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education
The national median for this job
$63,970around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $47,960 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $63,970 |
| Top tenth | $104,340 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Oklahoma · $48,200 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $102,350 |
| Spread | $54,150 |
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 | $62,760 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $64,585 |
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 | $102,350 | $80,833 | $74,458 |
| RI | $90,930 | $69,809 | $68,837 |
| OH | $77,370 | $61,848 | $67,364 |
| CA | $99,650 | $73,758 | $65,516 |
| MA | $94,000 | $70,579 | $65,207 |
| NM | $74,550 | $58,938 | $65,207 |
| DC | $96,580 | $71,533 | $64,558 |
| AK | $79,260 | $64,589 | $63,500 |
| PA | $77,060 | $60,676 | $62,232 |
| UT | $74,810 | $58,130 | $61,188 |
| NY | $85,760 | $65,128 | $60,513 |
| MN | $76,350 | $58,874 | $59,821 |
| CT | $80,600 | $61,849 | $59,649 |
| IL | $75,320 | $58,234 | $58,909 |
| DE | $75,920 | $58,460 | $58,900 |
| GA | $72,290 | $56,678 | $58,612 |
| MD | $77,680 | $60,152 | $57,858 |
| ND | $60,030 | $50,414 | $56,919 |
| NH | $72,410 | $59,770 | $56,738 |
| WY | $61,150 | $51,314 | $56,483 |
| NV | $65,040 | $54,440 | $56,135 |
| NJ | $78,200 | $61,052 | $56,071 |
| NE | $62,380 | $50,168 | $55,510 |
| IA | $60,580 | $49,166 | $55,387 |
| MI | $65,110 | $51,979 | $55,189 |
| TN | $59,980 | $50,374 | $54,449 |
| LA | $58,770 | $48,025 | $54,361 |
| OR | $77,130 | $56,892 | $54,327 |
| AL | $61,380 | $48,854 | $54,300 |
| TX | $62,760 | $52,608 | $54,137 |
| KY | $60,610 | $48,876 | $54,026 |
| ID | $61,600 | $49,264 | $53,885 |
| SC | $60,820 | $49,332 | $52,945 |
| WI | $61,210 | $49,183 | $52,830 |
| VT | $63,070 | $50,805 | $52,574 |
| IN | $59,700 | $48,417 | $52,522 |
| MT | $57,530 | $46,458 | $51,481 |
| VA | $65,550 | $51,841 | $51,456 |
| ME | $62,390 | $49,419 | $50,897 |
| HI | $71,410 | $55,083 | $50,717 |
| CO | $63,410 | $51,048 | $50,352 |
| WV | $55,630 | $45,197 | $50,346 |
| AR | $52,700 | $43,033 | $49,745 |
| KS | $56,450 | $44,676 | $49,660 |
| SD | $50,130 | $42,459 | $48,197 |
| FL | $58,930 | $49,530 | $47,878 |
| NC | $54,930 | $44,633 | $47,412 |
| MS | $49,790 | $40,287 | $46,152 |
| AZ | $56,590 | $46,638 | $46,128 |
| MO | $50,910 | $41,631 | $45,368 |
| OK | $48,200 | $39,240 | $44,447 |
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 $63,970 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $80,833.
- 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 — Oklahoma anchors the bottom at $44,447. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for elementary school teachers, except special education are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $63,970. 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 elementary school teachers, except special education 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 $80,833, 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 elementary school teachers, except special education 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.