Political Science Teachers, Postsecondary
What the pay figures show
- Massachusetts comes first for this job on every measure. $128,150 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $91,219 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For political science teachers, postsecondary, Massachusetts's $128,150 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $91,219. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$98,070
People doing it
16,970
Highest paid
$128,150
MA
Best off, really
$91,219
NH, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$56,450
Highest tenth
$174,660
Lowest, really
$54,443
MS
States with data
45
National average
$108,100
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
105.34%
NH, 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 $54,443 to $91,219.
- This is a small job: about 16,970 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 45 jurisdictions have a figure, with $98,070 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Massachusetts tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in political science 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 $54,443 to $91,219, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 16,970 workers, political science 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.
- 45 jurisdictions carry a published median for political science teachers, postsecondary. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Political Science Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $56,450 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $98,070 |
| Top tenth earn over | $174,660 |
| This salary | $98,070 |
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 Political Science Teachers, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
$98,070around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $56,450 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $98,070 |
| Top tenth | $174,660 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Political Science Teachers, Postsecondary, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $58,350 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Massachusetts · $128,150 |
| Spread | $69,800 |
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 | $86,950 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $89,478 |
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 | $124,110 | $96,095 | $91,219 |
| MT | $109,050 | $80,746 | $89,475 |
| MA | $128,150 | $92,769 | $85,708 |
| MI | $107,060 | $79,847 | $84,778 |
| VT | $107,490 | $79,465 | $82,232 |
| CA | $124,890 | $89,106 | $79,148 |
| MO | $94,500 | $71,807 | $78,253 |
| LA | $88,090 | $68,545 | $77,588 |
| NV | $93,300 | $74,467 | $76,785 |
| AZ | $99,910 | $77,021 | $76,180 |
| PA | $97,230 | $74,246 | $76,150 |
| IL | $100,700 | $74,833 | $75,699 |
| RI | $101,320 | $76,648 | $75,581 |
| MD | $105,630 | $78,409 | $75,419 |
| WY | $84,750 | $68,452 | $75,347 |
| VA | $101,430 | $75,114 | $74,556 |
| ME | $96,760 | $71,625 | $73,766 |
| WA | $101,140 | $79,982 | $73,674 |
| NE | $86,380 | $66,372 | $73,439 |
| MN | $97,170 | $72,105 | $73,265 |
| TX | $86,950 | $69,999 | $72,034 |
| CT | $100,230 | $74,578 | $71,925 |
| NY | $104,050 | $76,930 | $71,479 |
| TN | $81,330 | $66,046 | $71,389 |
| IN | $83,770 | $65,320 | $70,859 |
| IA | $80,160 | $62,788 | $70,734 |
| NM | $80,640 | $62,936 | $69,630 |
| OH | $80,090 | $63,687 | $69,367 |
| NJ | $100,260 | $75,166 | $69,034 |
| WI | $83,190 | $63,870 | $68,606 |
| KY | $78,670 | $61,538 | $68,022 |
| SD | $72,580 | $59,890 | $67,983 |
| DC | $102,310 | $75,077 | $67,757 |
| WV | $77,420 | $60,638 | $67,547 |
| AL | $77,860 | $60,291 | $67,013 |
| KS | $78,800 | $60,157 | $66,867 |
| SC | $78,650 | $61,261 | $65,747 |
| NC | $78,760 | $61,604 | $65,439 |
| UT | $80,610 | $61,952 | $65,211 |
| GA | $79,870 | $61,632 | $63,736 |
| FL | $77,860 | $63,605 | $61,482 |
| OR | $83,580 | $60,865 | $58,122 |
| OK | $63,400 | $50,769 | $57,506 |
| AR | $58,350 | $47,364 | $54,751 |
| MS | $59,270 | $47,525 | $54,443 |
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 $98,070.
- 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 $96,095.
- 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 $54,443. 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 political science teachers, postsecondary, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $98,070, 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 political science 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 $96,095, which leads in New Hampshire.
- Real-terms figures for political science 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.