Why Teachers Should Get Paid More: The Numbers Behind the Argument (2026)

“Teachers should be paid more” is usually argued with sentiment. It doesn’t have to be. The size of the gap is measured every year, the reasons it exists are reasonably well understood, and there is national evidence on what changes when pay goes up.

This page sets out the current numbers, why the gap exists, the strongest objection to the whole argument, and what the research says actually happens when districts pay teachers more.

How big the pay gap actually is

The clearest measure is the teacher pay penalty — how teachers’ weekly wages compare with those of other college graduates once education, experience and demographics are accounted for. The Economic Policy Institute has tracked it for three decades. In its September 2025 report, economist Sylvia Allegretto found the gap hit a record.

The gap is not uniform. Across states it ranges from −10.0% in Rhode Island to −38.5% in Colorado, and it is at least 25% in 20 states. Where you teach changes the size of the penalty far more than anything you personally do.

The gap widened because teacher pay stood still

The penalty did not grow because anyone cut teachers’ salaries. It grew because teacher pay stayed roughly level in real terms while everyone else’s moved.

Over the last decade, inflation-adjusted weekly wages fell by $46.39 for teachers and rose by $220.46 for other college graduates. Stretch that back further and the divergence is starker: teachers’ real wages were broadly flat from 1996 to 2021 — keeping pace with inflation and no more — and by 2024 sat 5.3% below their 1996 level. Over the same period, other college graduates’ wages rose by just over 30%.

This is why the argument is often framed badly. The question is not whether teachers got a raise this year; most years, they did. It is that the raises have not kept pace with what comparable qualifications earn elsewhere, for close to thirty years running.

The penalty is much larger for men

Broken down by sex, the 2024 wage penalty was −21.5% for women and −36.4% for men. Both are large; the male figure is dramatically larger.

That is not evidence that schools pay men less — salary schedules are published and do not vary by sex. It reflects what each group is being compared against: male college graduates outside teaching earn more on average, so a man who teaches gives up more relative to his alternatives. It is a useful figure to keep in mind for the recruitment arguments further down.

Why Teachers Are Underpaid

The gap is the result of several overlapping causes, not one decision anyone made deliberately.

Underfunded

Salaries are the largest line in a school budget, so when funding is constrained, pay is what gets squeezed. Districts rarely cut salaries outright — they let raises fall behind inflation instead, which produces the same result more slowly and with less argument.

That is visible in the long-run figures: teachers’ inflation-adjusted weekly wages have gone backwards since the mid-1990s while other graduates’ pay rose substantially. The gap widened without anyone announcing a pay cut.

Poor Public Perception

Teaching carries a persistent image problem: it gets treated as a fallback career, and the school calendar invites the assumption that it is an easy job with long holidays.

That perception matters because it shapes what voters will fund. It is also the source of the most common objection to paying teachers more, which is worth taking seriously rather than waving away — so it gets its own section below.

Reliance On Local Funding

Because US school funding leans heavily on local property taxes, teacher pay tracks local property wealth. Two districts an hour apart can pay very differently for identical work, and the districts with the least money often face the hardest teaching conditions. This is a large part of why the penalty varies so much by state.

Poor Union Representation

Bargaining power shows up directly in the numbers. The NEA reports that teachers earn 24% more in states where they have collective bargaining rights, and school support staff earn 13% more.

Teachers in states without meaningful bargaining rights are negotiating individually against a salary schedule they have little ability to move.

Gender Bias

Teaching is a heavily female profession — about 77% of US public school teachers are women, rising to roughly 89% at elementary level and 64% at secondary. Occupations that become female-dominated have historically been valued and paid less, and teaching carries that history.

This is a claim about a long-run pattern rather than about any individual district’s pay scale, which is set by a published schedule that does not vary by sex.

“But don’t teachers get summers off and better benefits?”

This is the strongest objection to the argument on this page, and most articles arguing for higher teacher pay simply skip it. It deserves a direct answer, because part of it is true.

Teachers do typically receive better benefits packages than comparable private-sector professionals — pensions and health coverage are genuinely more generous. The question is whether that advantage is large enough to cancel the wage gap.

Measured, it isn’t. Once benefits are included, the total compensation gap was still −17.1% in 2024. The benefits advantage narrows the gap by roughly ten percentage points; it does not close it.

On the calendar: teachers are generally paid for the days they work, and their annual salary is spread across twelve months rather than being a year-round wage with extra holiday. The pay penalty above already compares weekly wages, so it is not an artefact of counting summer weeks.

Average Public School Teacher Salary

Teacher salaries vary enormously by state and district. The national averages, from the NEA’s report published in April 2026:

• $74,495 — average public school teacher salary, 2024–25 (up from $71,985 in 2023–24, a nominal gain of 3.5%)
• $48,112 — national average starting teacher salary
• $38,494 — average for full-time education support professionals

The state spread is wide: California, New York and Washington average above $96,000, while Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana sit in the $55,000–$57,000 range. A national average is close to meaningless for an individual teacher — the state figure is the one that matters.

Note also that a nominal 3.5% raise is not a 3.5% improvement in living standards. Once inflation is accounted for, recent gains have been much smaller, which is how salaries can rise every year while the pay penalty keeps widening.

Why Teachers Should Get Paid More

The reasons below run roughly from the best-evidenced to the most values-based.

Increased Student Performance

This is the argument with the strongest national evidence behind it. In a 2022 study in SAGE Open, Emma García and Eunice S. Han linked district-level test performance to average teacher base salary across roughly 10,000 school districts.

Districts offering higher base salaries had significantly higher mathematics and English scores — on the order of a 0.2-point gain per 10% increase in teacher salary. The authors are careful about the size: the gain is “relatively small, but it applies to the general student population, potentially producing a large accumulated gain over the entire student body in the country.”

The finding that gets quoted least is arguably the most important: higher base salaries also narrowed the achievement gap between white and Black students, and between white and Hispanic students, by raising scores more for those students.

One caveat worth stating plainly, because most articles citing this study omit it: this is district-level observational data, not a controlled experiment. The models account for state effects and district characteristics, but higher-paying districts may differ in other ways that also help students. The finding is a strong, nationally representative association — it is not proof that a salary rise alone causes the gain.

Attract And Retain Quality Teachers

Pay competes. Graduates capable of teaching well are also capable of entering professions that pay roughly a quarter more for comparable qualifications. Every year the penalty widens, that trade-off gets harder to win on goodwill.

Address Teacher Shortage

Shortages are rarely uniform — they concentrate in specific subjects and specific districts, usually the lowest-paying ones. That pattern points at compensation rather than a general collapse of interest in teaching, and it is why targeted pay increases tend to be aimed at shortage subjects and hard-to-staff schools.

The more useful question is what happens when a shortage is not fixed. Reviewing the research, EPI points to a chain of consequences that are easy to miss because none of them looks like a headline: prospective teachers naming pay as a main barrier to entering the profession; parents steering their own children toward better-paying careers; districts fast-tracking credentials to fill permanent vacancies; growing use of teachers working outside their qualifications; and heavy reliance on unqualified substitutes.

That last set matters most for students. A shortage rarely presents as an empty classroom — the room is staffed. It presents as a class taught by someone teaching outside their subject, or by a rotating series of substitutes, which is a quieter and much harder problem to see in a budget line.

Reduced Turnover And Burnout

Turnover is expensive in a way that rarely appears in a pay debate: recruiting and inducting a replacement costs money, and a churning staff imposes real instructional costs on students. Retaining an experienced teacher is often cheaper than replacing them.

Encourages Students To Become Teachers

Prospective teachers are choosing a major years before they see a salary schedule, and they can see the comparison. A profession that visibly pays a quarter less than the alternatives has to recruit against that fact.

Professional Development

Teachers routinely fund their own further qualifications and classroom materials. Pay that leaves less discretionary income makes ongoing development something teachers subsidise personally rather than something the role supports.

Attract Male Teachers

Teaching is heavily female, and the share of men has fallen — from about 30% to 23% of US public K–12 teachers between 1987 and 2022, with the sharpest declines in career and technical education. Only around 17% of undergraduate education degrees now go to men. A more mixed workforce is a reasonable goal, particularly for students who rarely encounter a male teacher before secondary school.

The economic case here is real and often understated: as shown above, men who teach face a −36.4% wage penalty against comparable graduates, versus −21.5% for women. In pure opportunity-cost terms, teaching asks more of them.

But the obvious conclusion — that pay is what keeps men out — does not survive the survey data, and it is worth being accurate about. Men who teach report higher satisfaction with their pay than women who teach (54% vs 48%), have higher ten-year retention (60% vs 54%), and are considerably more likely to move into school leadership. Men are also more likely than women to enter teaching as career switchers.

The honest reading is that the two measures answer different questions. The penalty describes what men give up to teach; the satisfaction data describes how the men who do teach feel about it. Taken together, the barriers to recruiting men look substantially social and reputational, not only economic — so higher pay is a reasonable lever here, but not a complete explanation.

Reflect Value Of Education

Pay is a signal as well as a transaction. A society that says education is its foundation while paying its teachers a quarter less than comparable professions is sending two messages, and salaries are the more credible one.

Cost Of Living And Family Expenses

Teachers face the same housing, childcare and household costs as everyone else — and often in the districts where housing is most expensive, since that is where the schools are. Starting salaries near $48,000 stretch very differently in California than in Mississippi.

Fair Payment

The simplest version of the argument: teachers hold comparable qualifications to the professionals they are being compared against. A 26.9% weekly wage gap for equivalent education and experience is the plainest statement of the case, and it needs no appeal to sentiment at all.

Frequently asked questions

How much less do teachers actually earn?

In 2024, US public school teachers earned 26.9% less in weekly wages than college graduates in other professions with comparable education and experience — about 73 cents on the dollar. That is the widest gap since tracking began in the 1990s, when it was 6.1%.

Doesn’t the benefits package make up for it?

Only partly. Teachers do receive better benefits than comparable private-sector professionals, but once benefits are counted the total compensation gap was still −17.1% in 2024. The benefits advantage narrows the gap; it does not close it.

What is the average teacher salary in the US?

$74,495 for 2024–25, up from $71,985 the previous year, with a national average starting salary of $48,112. State averages range from above $96,000 in California, New York and Washington to the mid-$50,000s in Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana.

Does paying teachers more actually improve results?

The national evidence says yes, modestly. Across roughly 10,000 districts, higher average teacher base salaries were associated with significantly higher maths and English scores — around 0.2 points per 10% salary increase — and with a narrowing of the achievement gap for Black and Hispanic students.

Why does teacher pay vary so much between states?

Because US schools are funded largely through local and state sources rather than nationally. The pay penalty itself ranges from −10.0% in Rhode Island to −38.5% in Colorado, and teachers earn about 24% more in states with collective bargaining rights.