Physics Teachers, Postsecondary
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for physics teachers, postsecondary is California, at $139,420. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and New Mexico comes out ahead, worth $90,062. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for physics teachers, postsecondary: California leads at $139,420 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting New Mexico to $90,062 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
$100,310
People doing it
13,090
Highest paid
$139,420
CA
Best off, really
$90,062
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$60,200
Highest tenth
$177,850
Lowest, really
$53,166
AZ
States with data
47
National average
$111,460
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, 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 $53,166 to $90,062.
- This is a small job: about 13,090 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 47 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $100,310. 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 physics 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 $53,166 to $90,062, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 13,090 workers, physics 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 physics teachers, postsecondary in 47 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: Physics Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $60,200 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $100,310 |
| Top tenth earn over | $177,850 |
| This salary | $100,310 |
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 Physics Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
$100,310around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $60,200 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $100,310 |
| Top tenth | $177,850 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Physics Teachers, Postsecondary, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $64,900 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $139,420 |
| Spread | $74,520 |
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 | $97,760 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $100,602 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NM | $108,850 | $81,403 | $90,062 |
| ND | $101,700 | $79,652 | $89,929 |
| IA | $104,270 | $78,833 | $88,809 |
| CA | $139,420 | $97,686 | $86,769 |
| MI | $109,090 | $81,189 | $86,203 |
| ID | $106,040 | $78,662 | $86,040 |
| IN | $102,970 | $78,261 | $84,897 |
| WV | $98,320 | $74,384 | $82,859 |
| NE | $98,460 | $74,320 | $82,234 |
| MO | $99,970 | $75,398 | $82,167 |
| MT | $98,050 | $73,629 | $81,589 |
| OH | $96,310 | $74,652 | $81,310 |
| KS | $97,140 | $72,036 | $80,071 |
| DE | $108,810 | $79,427 | $80,025 |
| TX | $97,760 | $77,604 | $79,860 |
| MN | $107,240 | $78,504 | $79,767 |
| CT | $112,410 | $82,416 | $79,484 |
| LA | $90,040 | $69,858 | $79,074 |
| NV | $96,330 | $76,598 | $78,983 |
| OK | $91,580 | $69,636 | $78,875 |
| MD | $110,980 | $81,905 | $78,782 |
| SD | $86,010 | $69,338 | $78,708 |
| ME | $104,270 | $76,371 | $78,654 |
| UT | $99,860 | $74,638 | $78,564 |
| GA | $101,580 | $75,821 | $78,410 |
| PA | $98,370 | $75,013 | $76,937 |
| VA | $104,490 | $77,091 | $76,518 |
| VT | $98,390 | $73,664 | $76,229 |
| MA | $111,280 | $81,871 | $75,640 |
| NH | $99,050 | $78,512 | $74,528 |
| CO | $99,280 | $75,014 | $73,991 |
| WI | $89,630 | $68,019 | $73,062 |
| IL | $94,900 | $71,039 | $71,862 |
| NC | $87,370 | $67,317 | $71,509 |
| WA | $96,930 | $77,020 | $70,946 |
| NY | $103,100 | $76,318 | $70,911 |
| TN | $80,630 | $65,553 | $70,857 |
| AL | $82,750 | $63,541 | $70,625 |
| OR | $104,320 | $73,641 | $70,321 |
| KY | $80,270 | $62,608 | $69,205 |
| NJ | $98,920 | $74,309 | $68,247 |
| SC | $81,210 | $62,893 | $67,498 |
| MS | $71,160 | $56,137 | $64,309 |
| AR | $64,900 | $52,384 | $60,554 |
| FL | $74,050 | $60,924 | $58,891 |
| DC | $85,190 | $64,489 | $58,201 |
| AZ | $65,730 | $53,753 | $53,166 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for physics teachers, postsecondary as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $100,310, 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.
- Take-home figures for physics teachers, postsecondary 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 California, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $97,686.
- Levelling out prices for physics teachers, postsecondary 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 — Arizona sits at the bottom on $53,166.
- These are distribution medians for physics teachers, postsecondary, with a national value of $100,310. 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.
- Take-home calculations for physics teachers, postsecondary 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 $97,686, in California. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to physics 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 Arizona at $53,166. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Arizona anchors the bottom at $53,166 — and the two source series are dated independently.