How Teachers View Their Pay and Benefits

Ask most K-12 public school teachers what would make them stay in the profession, better pay is usually at the top of the list. The educator shortage is, after all, not the result of a lack of qualified individuals who want to teach. It’s about a deficit of people willing to work for lower pay in often very stressful conditions. So recruiting and retaining educators always begins with professional salaries. 

Although the most recent National Education Association (NEA) data shows the average national teacher salary increasing by 4.2 percent in 2022-23, inflation has neutralized the benefits, even in some states where increases were the highest. Too many educators are still facing a challenging financial climate, unable to make ends meet and even afford to live in the communities where they work. 

No surprise then that teachers’ perceptions of their pay have not changed—and maybe worsened, according to the RAND Corporation's 2024 State of the American Teacher survey. Although two-thirds reported receiving a pay increase between the 202-23 and 2023-24 school years, the survey found that most teachers view their base pay as inadequate. Released in November, the survey (funded by the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers) looks at how teachers view their pay and benefits, expenses, and intention to stay in their jobs. 

About 1 in 4 teachers who received less than a 3 percent raise said they planned to leave the profession at the end of the 2023-24 school year. Of their counterparts whose pay rose 5 percent to 10 percent in the same period, only 11 percent said they planned to stop teaching. Low pay was cited as a top source of job-related stress for one in three teachers. 

How teachers perceive their pay is also influenced, not surprisingly, by other factors, including access to benefits such as paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and even housing assistance.   

“Offering a broader set of benefits and improving the quality of those benefits could improve teachers' perceptions of their pay and improve retention,” said Elizabeth Steiner, co-author of the RAND report. “We found teachers who had better perceptions of their benefits also had better perceptions of their pay.” 

And those better perceptions are significantly more likely to be found in states that allow collective bargaining. In these states, teachers reported not only higher pay, but access to a wider array of other benefits than teachers in states that prohibit collective bargaining.

How Teachers' Benefits Compare to Similar Working Adults

With so many teachers reporting their salary as inadequate, a large number look to work extra duties in the school system for extra pay. The survey revealed that 65 percent of teachers reported taking on extra work, such as coaching sports, mentoring or serving as department chair. However, one in four teachers said they were not paid for this extra work. 

RAND compared the teacher data to a separate, nationally representative survey of working adults. They found that teachers in single-earner households spent larger shares of their household incomes on housing, childcare, and student debt payments than similar working adults in single-earner households. Thirty-seven percent of teachers who were housing cost–burdened (housing costs exceeding 30 percent of household income) said that they were likely to leave their schools, and 30 percent said they would leave the profession.

Employer-provided benefits could help teachers pay for these household expenses, but they are uncommon. Overall, teachers held less favorable views of their benefits than other working adults. 

Indeed, working adults reported better access than teachers to benefits such as paid personal time off, paid parental leave, and tuition reimbursement. The largest difference was for paid parental leave. Only one-third of teachers reported having paid parental leave, compared to nearly half of similar working adults.   

“That gap in parental leave was particularly startling to me,” said Steiner. “Especially because so many teachers are women. Anyone who wants to be a parent should have access to paid parental leave, but I thought it there would be more parity between teachers and similar working adults.”   

The Financial Pressure on Black Teachers   

The RAND survey broke down the responses by race and other demographics, which revealed sobering data about how Back teachers are disproportionately impacted by lower pay and benefits. 

Black teachers earned lower salaries than other teachers and reported the smallest pay increases. Nearly half of Black teachers said that low pay was a top source of job-related stress.

Furthermore, Black teachers were more likely than White teachers to report that they performed extra work for no pay and were about twice as likely as White teachers and Hispanic teachers to report paying for housing, childcare, and student loans simultaneously. 

According to a RAND survey released in June, Black teachers are more likely to say they plan to leave teaching at the end of the 2023-24 school year than White teachers, which would further hasten the decline of the the number of Black teachers in U.S. public schools. Research shows that having Black teachers in the classroom has a positive impact on all students, regardless of their race. but is especially important to students of color, often resulting in higher test scores and a greater likelihood of graduating from college. 

While multiple conditions could explain the racial pay gap among teachers, one factor in a particular stands out.  Black teachers make up only 6 percent of the public school teacher workforce nationwide but are 15 to 20 percent of the workforce in many of the states that prohibit collective bargaining. “Teachers in these states on average report lower pay than teachers in bargaining states,” Steiner says. 

The Impact of Collective Bargaining 

In many of these non-collective bargaining states over the past few years, educators' tireless advocacy has notched up major wins in state legislatures that have produced large, even historic, salary increases. 

Still, there’s no denying the “union advantage.” The fact is educators who work in states with collective bargaining laws make more money.  

According to the RAND survey, teachers in states where bargaining is prohibited reported lower base pay and smaller pay increases. They were also less likely to be paid for extra work, regardless of their race and ethnicity. 

In addition to higher pay, the RAND survey found that more teachers in states requiring collective bargaining reported having employer contributions to retirement plans, paid parental leave, employer contributions to health insurance premiums, paid sick leave, and tuition reimbursement.

This is due to unions demanding and winning not only higher pay but paid family leave and other critical benefits to improve the lives of educators and help keep them in the profession.

“There are a confluence of factors and circumstances that relate to how teachers feel about their pay,” Steiner said. “Benefits play into that. Expenses play into that and obviously salary increases play into that.” 

Still, in addressing teacher retention, Steiner added that it’s important not to lose sight of working conditions as well—workload, administrator support, collaborative relationships with colleagues, and class size.  

“These all play a role in how teachers perceive their job. So pay and benefits are conditions that help teachers feel their work is valued, but they are not the only—and in many cases maybe not even the most important—factors that will determine how long they want to stay in the classroom.”