Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is Washington, at $49,120. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Maine comes out ahead, worth $39,041. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for teaching assistants, except postsecondary: Washington leads at $49,120 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Maine to $39,041 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
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$36,780
People doing it
1,420,350
Highest paid
$49,120
WA
Best off, really
$39,041
ME, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$27,150
Highest tenth
$50,040
Lowest, really
$22,739
AL
States with data
51
National average
$38,290
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
97.1%
ME, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $22,739 up to $39,041.
- About 1,420,350 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.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $36,780, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- The nominal spread for teaching assistants, except postsecondary approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $22,739 to $39,041, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- 1,420,350 workers are employed nationally in teaching assistants, except postsecondary. 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.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for teaching assistants, except postsecondary, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $27,150 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $36,780 |
| Top tenth earn over | $50,040 |
| This salary | $36,780 |
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 Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary
The national median for this job
$36,780around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $27,150 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $36,780 |
| Top tenth | $50,040 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alabama · $24,070 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $49,120 |
| Spread | $25,050 |
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 | $29,850 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $30,718 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ME | $46,750 | $37,908 | $39,041 |
| WA | $49,120 | $41,648 | $38,363 |
| VT | $43,800 | $36,162 | $37,422 |
| ND | $38,240 | $32,906 | $37,152 |
| DC | $46,920 | $38,231 | $34,503 |
| WY | $36,100 | $31,186 | $34,328 |
| CA | $46,490 | $38,539 | $34,233 |
| WI | $37,800 | $31,542 | $33,881 |
| NM | $35,900 | $30,449 | $33,688 |
| MN | $40,100 | $33,074 | $33,606 |
| OH | $35,920 | $30,770 | $33,514 |
| MO | $36,300 | $30,578 | $33,323 |
| NE | $35,160 | $29,535 | $32,680 |
| ID | $35,560 | $29,721 | $32,509 |
| MT | $34,750 | $29,225 | $32,385 |
| UT | $37,050 | $30,301 | $31,895 |
| AK | $37,190 | $32,062 | $31,522 |
| VA | $38,520 | $31,677 | $31,441 |
| NH | $38,440 | $33,067 | $31,389 |
| DE | $37,830 | $31,044 | $31,277 |
| MI | $35,110 | $29,149 | $30,949 |
| RI | $37,220 | $31,111 | $30,677 |
| IL | $36,990 | $30,215 | $30,565 |
| CT | $38,110 | $31,606 | $30,482 |
| IN | $33,300 | $27,984 | $30,356 |
| AZ | $35,900 | $30,531 | $30,197 |
| OR | $39,850 | $31,263 | $29,853 |
| PA | $34,740 | $29,027 | $29,771 |
| MA | $39,380 | $32,173 | $29,724 |
| CO | $35,760 | $30,048 | $29,639 |
| IA | $30,510 | $26,147 | $29,456 |
| MD | $37,060 | $30,561 | $29,395 |
| NY | $38,240 | $31,438 | $29,210 |
| NJ | $37,290 | $31,555 | $28,981 |
| FL | $34,430 | $29,845 | $28,849 |
| NV | $31,900 | $27,812 | $28,678 |
| AR | $28,790 | $24,706 | $28,559 |
| WV | $29,800 | $25,403 | $28,298 |
| SD | $28,220 | $24,849 | $28,207 |
| KY | $30,160 | $25,476 | $28,160 |
| HI | $36,810 | $30,326 | $27,922 |
| TN | $29,210 | $25,650 | $27,725 |
| KS | $29,490 | $24,518 | $27,253 |
| NC | $29,790 | $25,436 | $27,020 |
| OK | $27,920 | $23,846 | $27,010 |
| TX | $29,850 | $26,164 | $26,925 |
| LA | $27,400 | $23,738 | $26,870 |
| SC | $27,860 | $24,297 | $26,076 |
| GA | $28,770 | $24,460 | $25,295 |
| MS | $25,840 | $21,948 | $25,143 |
| AL | $24,070 | $20,458 | $22,739 |
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 $36,780.
- 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 Washington, at $41,648.
- Levelling out prices for this job 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 — Alabama sits at the bottom on $22,739.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for teaching assistants, except postsecondary, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $36,780, 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 teaching assistants, except 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 $41,648, which leads in Washington.
- The price deflation applied to teaching assistants, except 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 Alabama at $22,739. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Alabama anchors the bottom at $22,739 — and the two source series are dated independently.