Occupation / job
Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
At $78,620 against a $50,020 midpoint, Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary pays $28,600 a year more than the typical American job — $13.75 an hour. Nothing pays that much more for free, and the thing it is paid for is what you should be reading about.
93,560 people are employed as Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.
These posts suit people who genuinely enjoy explaining a field to people encountering it for the first time, every year, to a new set of them.
We carry no verified training length for Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
A quarter earn below $61,620 and a quarter above $103,850: a 1.7x ratio, $42,230 between the ends. That is an ordinary working spread, which also means experience and location explain most of it and there is no shortcut through the middle.
At $61,620, or $29.62 an hour, the 25th percentile sits $11,600 above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Occupations with floors this high almost always have a requirement holding them there.
Avoid it if you need a permanent post at the end; a great deal of this teaching is done on contracts that are not.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 93,560 figure counts people already working as Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
1.7x between $61,620 and $103,850 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $78,620 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
In cash terms the middle half of Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary runs $61,620 to $103,850 — $42,230 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $78,620.
Getting to $103,850, the 75th percentile, is worth $25,230 a year more than the $78,620 midpoint and $42,230 more than the $61,620 a quarter of Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary settle for.
$25,230 separates $78,620 from the $103,850 top quarter, while only $17,000 separates it from $61,620. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary is $37.79 an hour. The quarters sit at $29.62 and $49.92, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary. The self-employed are excluded, so $78,620 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary, the hourly figure is $78,620 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else