Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary
What the pay figures show
- Maryland comes first for this job on every measure. $58,330 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $48,275 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For teaching assistants, postsecondary, Maryland's $58,330 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $48,275. 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
$42,910
People doing it
164,090
Highest paid
$58,330
MD
Best off, really
$48,275
TX, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$28,600
Highest tenth
$76,420
Lowest, really
$21,467
AL
States with data
45
National average
$47,670
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
97.17%
TX, 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 $21,467 to $48,275.
- Roughly 164,090 people hold this job nationally, earning $42,910 in the middle. A solid, ordinary-sized job.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 45 jurisdictions, averaging $42,910 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. Maryland leads the published set.
- Interstate variation in teaching assistants, 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 $21,467 to $48,275, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- 164,090 are employed nationally in teaching assistants, postsecondary, placing it well inside the reported range without approaching the highest-headcount occupations.
- Coverage for teaching assistants, 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: Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $28,600 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $42,910 |
| Top tenth earn over | $76,420 |
| This salary | $42,910 |
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, Postsecondary
The national median for this job
$42,910around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $28,600 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $42,910 |
| Top tenth | $76,420 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Teaching Assistants, Postsecondary, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alabama · $22,600 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Maryland · $58,330 |
| Spread | $35,730 |
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 | $55,670 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $57,288 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| TX | $55,670 | $46,911 | $48,275 |
| ND | $49,960 | $42,323 | $47,784 |
| OK | $49,920 | $40,545 | $45,924 |
| MD | $58,330 | $46,641 | $44,862 |
| KY | $49,680 | $40,477 | $44,741 |
| OH | $48,710 | $40,695 | $44,325 |
| NM | $48,270 | $39,857 | $44,096 |
| UT | $52,300 | $41,876 | $44,079 |
| MN | $53,380 | $42,964 | $43,655 |
| NC | $50,050 | $40,907 | $43,454 |
| WI | $47,990 | $39,228 | $42,136 |
| SC | $46,760 | $38,967 | $41,821 |
| MA | $56,370 | $44,975 | $41,552 |
| VT | $48,620 | $39,874 | $41,262 |
| AZ | $49,810 | $41,360 | $40,908 |
| GA | $48,800 | $39,554 | $40,905 |
| NJ | $54,260 | $44,328 | $40,711 |
| RI | $49,420 | $40,456 | $39,892 |
| VA | $49,890 | $40,159 | $39,860 |
| ME | $47,210 | $38,247 | $39,390 |
| WA | $50,460 | $42,725 | $39,355 |
| SD | $39,840 | $34,191 | $38,812 |
| KS | $41,580 | $33,558 | $37,301 |
| IA | $38,960 | $32,616 | $36,743 |
| OR | $49,550 | $38,208 | $36,485 |
| NE | $39,650 | $32,938 | $36,446 |
| LA | $37,950 | $31,921 | $36,132 |
| CA | $49,140 | $40,523 | $35,995 |
| MI | $39,830 | $32,741 | $34,763 |
| TN | $36,950 | $31,869 | $34,448 |
| ID | $37,310 | $31,034 | $33,945 |
| WV | $35,960 | $30,158 | $33,594 |
| NY | $43,610 | $35,463 | $32,950 |
| PA | $38,020 | $31,562 | $32,371 |
| DC | $43,160 | $35,435 | $31,980 |
| IN | $34,910 | $29,230 | $31,708 |
| FL | $37,770 | $32,528 | $31,443 |
| CO | $37,450 | $31,332 | $30,905 |
| AK | $35,790 | $30,937 | $30,416 |
| IL | $36,040 | $29,499 | $29,841 |
| MT | $30,070 | $25,685 | $28,461 |
| AR | $23,140 | $20,251 | $23,409 |
| NV | $24,960 | $22,165 | $22,855 |
| NH | $26,810 | $23,688 | $22,486 |
| AL | $22,600 | $19,314 | $21,467 |
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 $42,910.
- 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 Texas, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $46,911.
- 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 — Alabama anchors the bottom at $21,467. 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 teaching assistants, postsecondary, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $42,910, 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.
- Take-home calculations for teaching assistants, 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 $46,911, in Texas. 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 figures for teaching assistants, 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.