Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. New Hampshire pays this job best, at $101,750. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $76,331 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for foreign language and literature teachers, postsecondary is also the real leader: New Hampshire at $101,750, holding through tax and through price deflation to $76,331. 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
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$79,350
People doing it
19,830
Highest paid
$101,750
NH
Best off, really
$76,331
NH, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$49,060
Highest tenth
$136,050
Lowest, really
$50,420
MS
States with data
45
National average
$89,990
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
105.34%
NH, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- The state you work in changes what this job pays, but less than you would expect. Level out tax and prices and the whole country sits between $50,420 and $76,331. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- Just 19,830 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 45 jurisdictions, averaging $79,350 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. New Hampshire leads the published set.
- Interstate variation for foreign language and literature teachers, postsecondary is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $50,420 to $76,331. A differential of this magnitude is real but rarely decisive on its own, which is worth stating plainly against wage tables that present nominal gaps without either adjustment.
- 19,830 are employed nationally in foreign language and literature teachers, postsecondary — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- Coverage for foreign language and literature teachers, postsecondary runs to 45 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $49,060 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $79,350 |
| Top tenth earn over | $136,050 |
| This salary | $79,350 |
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 Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
$79,350around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $49,060 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $79,350 |
| Top tenth | $136,050 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $54,670 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Hampshire · $101,750 |
| Spread | $47,080 |
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 | $75,090 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $77,273 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NH | $101,750 | $80,411 | $76,331 |
| DE | $101,100 | $74,512 | $75,073 |
| SD | $81,080 | $65,870 | $74,771 |
| ME | $96,970 | $71,757 | $73,903 |
| NV | $84,980 | $68,613 | $70,750 |
| IA | $79,880 | $62,602 | $70,524 |
| MT | $79,970 | $61,931 | $68,627 |
| MA | $98,750 | $73,683 | $68,075 |
| MI | $83,190 | $64,069 | $68,026 |
| LA | $75,410 | $60,005 | $67,921 |
| TN | $76,350 | $62,542 | $67,602 |
| WV | $76,340 | $59,928 | $66,756 |
| NY | $95,120 | $71,175 | $66,132 |
| CA | $99,860 | $73,887 | $65,630 |
| WI | $78,490 | $60,843 | $65,354 |
| SC | $77,790 | $60,713 | $65,159 |
| OH | $74,310 | $59,780 | $65,111 |
| MO | $76,110 | $59,734 | $65,096 |
| IN | $74,590 | $59,133 | $64,147 |
| MD | $87,280 | $66,449 | $63,915 |
| UT | $78,570 | $60,608 | $63,796 |
| TX | $75,090 | $61,656 | $63,448 |
| NM | $71,720 | $57,080 | $63,151 |
| IL | $81,530 | $62,295 | $63,017 |
| OR | $91,670 | $65,849 | $62,880 |
| MN | $80,650 | $61,606 | $62,597 |
| PA | $77,210 | $60,777 | $62,335 |
| AL | $70,580 | $55,454 | $61,636 |
| AK | $76,490 | $62,641 | $61,585 |
| ND | $64,540 | $54,038 | $61,010 |
| FL | $76,230 | $62,458 | $60,374 |
| CO | $77,840 | $60,874 | $60,044 |
| CT | $80,630 | $61,869 | $59,667 |
| GA | $73,370 | $57,383 | $59,342 |
| WA | $78,320 | $63,928 | $58,886 |
| AR | $62,900 | $50,851 | $58,782 |
| KY | $65,630 | $52,734 | $58,291 |
| KS | $65,890 | $51,735 | $57,505 |
| VA | $74,000 | $57,395 | $56,968 |
| AZ | $71,230 | $57,562 | $56,933 |
| NJ | $79,060 | $61,603 | $56,577 |
| OK | $61,580 | $49,389 | $55,942 |
| DC | $78,930 | $60,617 | $54,706 |
| NC | $63,900 | $51,483 | $54,688 |
| MS | $54,670 | $44,013 | $50,420 |
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 $79,350.
- 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 New Hampshire, at $80,411.
- 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 — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $50,420. 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 foreign language and literature teachers, postsecondary, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $79,350, 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 foreign language and literature 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 $80,411, which leads in New Hampshire.
- Real-terms figures for foreign language and literature teachers, postsecondary 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.