Raises without gains: Teachers’ salaries increased, but many don’t make a living wage

Katherine Bowser:

A lot can change over the course of a decade, including the financial goals you’re working toward. As you progress in your career, you expect your salary to help bring those goals within reach. For a teacher who entered the classroom just out of college, that might mean affording a down payment on a home or starting a family; for a veteran teacher, it might mean paying off a mortgage or putting enough away to retire comfortably.

But while teachers’ salaries grew over the last decade, their buying power shrank as pandemic-era inflation drove up the cost of living—making such milestones harder to afford. The median sale price for a new home, for example, rose from $280,400 to $429,000 between the 2014–15 and 2024–25 academic years.¹

In this District Trendline, using data drawn from NCTQ’s District Policy Pathfinder, we examine teacher salaries in 133 of the largest districts²in the United States. We find that teacher salary growth over the past 10 years looks a lot different after accounting for inflation, and that in some large districts, salaries fall short of what teachers need to meet basic living expenses.

The average starting salary of a new teacher rose by 33%