Occupation / job
Education 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 $75,350 against a $50,020 midpoint, Education Teachers, Postsecondary pays $25,330 a year more than the typical American job — $12.17 an hour. Nothing pays that much more for free, and the thing it is paid for is what you should be reading about.
60,830 people are employed as Education Teachers, Postsecondary. At that scale every large metro has a real market, and the difference between a good year and a bad one is usually which employer you are at rather than whether anyone is hiring.
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.
No verified preparation time is on file for Education Teachers, Postsecondary. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
$43,820 separates the bottom quarter of Education Teachers, Postsecondary at $53,770 from the top quarter at $97,590. At a 1.8x ratio the midpoint is a weak guide to your own first year — find out which end you would be entering at.
The bottom quarter of Education Teachers, Postsecondary still clears $53,770 — $3,750 above the $50,020 typical job. A high floor is the most valuable and least advertised property an occupation can have.
Avoid it if you cannot afford a long training period that ends without a guaranteed permanent post.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 60,830 figure counts people already working as Education 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
At 1.8x, the distribution for Education Teachers, Postsecondary is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $53,770 to $97,590 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.
Put in money rather than ratios: $53,770 at the 25th percentile, $75,350 at the midpoint, $97,590 at the 75th. $43,820 separates the quarter of Education Teachers, Postsecondary at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $97,590, the 75th percentile, is worth $22,240 a year more than the $75,350 midpoint and $43,820 more than the $53,770 a quarter of Education Teachers, Postsecondary settle for.
$21,580 down to $53,770, $22,240 up to $97,590: the midpoint of Education Teachers, Postsecondary is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $25.85 at the bottom quarter, $36.22 at the midpoint, $46.91 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $75,350 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
The hourly number on this page is $75,350 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Education Teachers, Postsecondary, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else