Complaints about teacher pay are a common refrain in education. Now, new data help to measure the gap between teachers’ hopes and reality.
If teachers had their way, they’d get a 25% raise, finds a new survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center on behalf of Allovue, a K-12 education finance company.
The survey, conducted from February to April, asked 710 teacher respondents what they would consider a fair salary for the work they do. The median response was $85,000—about 25% higher than the median actual salary of $68,000.
The findings come as districts seek to create conditions that allow them to recruit and retain talented teachers. They face strong headwinds, including inflation that drives down teacher spending power, growing health care costs, and tight budgets.
Fifty-five percent of all survey respondents, who also included 507 district leaders and 447 principals, said their district is worse off financially than it was three years ago. That’s up from 39% of respondents to the survey last year.
“While my salary has technically risen over the past 10 years, when adjusted for inflation, my take-home pay has dropped $10,000 during that same time,” a Michigan elementary school teacher said in an open-ended survey response. “Increases in the amount that we contribute to retirement, increases in payments towards retirement health care, current health care premium increases (all mandated by the state) have cut our take-home pay.”
Inflation blunts effect of salary increases
That concern mirrors findings of the National Education Association’s annual survey on educator pay, released in April, which estimated the average teacher salary would increase by 3% in the 2024-25 school year to $74,177. But, when that pay is adjusted for inflation, teachers make about 5.1% less than they did 10 years ago, that report said.
That may be why 67% of teachers responding to the EdWeek Research Center survey said their district should spend a “much larger share” of their budget on teacher salaries, even if it would mean cuts in other areas. That’s down from 73% last year and 74% in the 2022-23 school year. By comparison, 52% of school leaders and 44% of district leaders said their school systems should spend more on teacher salaries. (Districts spend an average of 55% of their budgets on employee salaries and 24% on benefits, federal data show.)
The difference in perspectives may be in part because leaders are more aware of the full cost of teacher employment. Asked about the cost of teacher benefits, like health care, pensions, and time off, 63% of teachers underestimated the expense, which is about half of an average teacher’s salary, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In contrast, 53% of school leaders and 47% of district leaders underestimated that expense.
Administrators also want higher pay. Among district leaders responding to a question about fair pay for their jobs, the median answer was $150,000, compared to a median actual salary of $125,000. Principals’ median answer was $120,000, compared to actual pay of $100,000.
The findings come after politicians on both sides of the aisle have called for increases to educator salaries in recent years. At the state level, lawmakers have passed school funding increases or mandates for districts to increase teacher pay. In Arkansas, Florida, and Utah, for example, lawmakers expanded teacher pay requirements as part of legislative packages that also expanded private school choice programs. Other states, including Maryland and Tennessee, have passed more straightforward pay increases.
At the federal level, Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Edward Markey, D-Mass., have reintroduced education bills that would require states to increase minimum salaries for teachers to $60,000 and the minimum wage for support staff to $45,000, or $30 per hour.
“You are the champions of the students of our nation. It’s now time for us to be the champions for you,” said Markey during a town hall held July 24.
A previous version of that bill failed to make it out of committee, even when Democrats had control of the Senate. The policy has faced opposition from Republicans who argue for a limited federal role in education.
Jess Gartner, Allovue’s founder and CEO, serves on the board of trustees for Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Education Week. The Education Week newsroom, which did not participate in the survey project, independently reported its results.
