Special Education Teachers, Preschool
What the pay figures show
- Massachusetts comes first for this job on every measure. $99,070 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $68,268 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For special education teachers, preschool, Massachusetts's $99,070 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $68,268. 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
$64,830
People doing it
29,510
Highest paid
$99,070
MA
Best off, really
$68,268
MA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$45,620
Highest tenth
$130,040
Lowest, really
$34,576
AR
States with data
45
National average
$76,380
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.24%
MA, 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 $34,576 to $68,268.
- This is a small job: about 29,510 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 45 jurisdictions, averaging $64,830 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. Massachusetts leads the published set.
- Interstate variation in special education teachers, preschool 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 $34,576 to $68,268, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 29,510 workers, special education teachers, preschool 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.
- Coverage for special education teachers, preschool 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: Special Education Teachers, Preschool
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $45,620 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $64,830 |
| Top tenth earn over | $130,040 |
| This salary | $64,830 |
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 Special Education Teachers, Preschool
The national median for this job
$64,830around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $45,620 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $64,830 |
| Top tenth | $130,040 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Special Education Teachers, Preschool, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $35,580 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Massachusetts · $99,070 |
| Spread | $63,490 |
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 | $65,680 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $67,589 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MA | $99,070 | $73,892 | $68,268 |
| PA | $83,510 | $65,016 | $66,683 |
| AK | $80,390 | $65,384 | $64,282 |
| CT | $87,960 | $66,622 | $64,252 |
| WA | $86,580 | $69,739 | $64,239 |
| NJ | $92,060 | $69,920 | $64,216 |
| VT | $79,000 | $61,303 | $63,438 |
| MI | $75,860 | $59,224 | $62,881 |
| MD | $85,010 | $64,960 | $62,483 |
| CO | $78,040 | $61,006 | $60,174 |
| MN | $75,880 | $58,575 | $59,517 |
| VA | $77,570 | $59,701 | $59,257 |
| NM | $66,010 | $53,282 | $58,950 |
| GA | $72,310 | $56,691 | $58,626 |
| IA | $63,540 | $51,432 | $57,940 |
| ND | $60,060 | $50,438 | $56,946 |
| TX | $65,680 | $54,954 | $56,551 |
| NE | $62,760 | $50,456 | $55,829 |
| MO | $62,250 | $50,209 | $54,717 |
| OR | $77,490 | $57,114 | $54,539 |
| OH | $60,700 | $50,000 | $54,459 |
| TN | $59,550 | $50,028 | $54,076 |
| HI | $75,120 | $57,411 | $52,860 |
| LA | $56,890 | $46,571 | $52,715 |
| WI | $60,870 | $48,930 | $52,558 |
| SC | $59,800 | $48,580 | $52,137 |
| KS | $59,220 | $46,747 | $51,962 |
| NC | $60,180 | $48,642 | $51,671 |
| IL | $62,580 | $49,510 | $50,084 |
| NY | $68,180 | $53,710 | $49,904 |
| ME | $60,680 | $48,161 | $49,600 |
| NH | $61,720 | $51,772 | $49,145 |
| AZ | $60,130 | $49,394 | $48,854 |
| UT | $58,230 | $46,377 | $48,816 |
| KY | $54,220 | $43,966 | $48,598 |
| WY | $52,100 | $44,042 | $48,479 |
| MS | $52,420 | $42,295 | $48,452 |
| DE | $59,250 | $47,066 | $47,420 |
| RI | $59,310 | $48,031 | $47,363 |
| FL | $58,240 | $48,976 | $47,342 |
| OK | $49,720 | $40,393 | $45,753 |
| ID | $49,610 | $40,266 | $44,042 |
| IN | $48,680 | $39,888 | $43,270 |
| CA | $59,550 | $48,263 | $42,869 |
| AR | $35,580 | $29,911 | $34,576 |
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 $64,830 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 Massachusetts, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $73,892.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Arkansas, on $34,576.
- All wage figures for special education teachers, preschool are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $64,830. 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 special education teachers, preschool 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 $73,892, in Massachusetts. 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 results for special education teachers, preschool rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Arkansas anchors the distribution at $34,576. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.