Occupation / job
English Language and Literature 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
A midpoint of $78,760 against $50,020 means English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary pays $2,395 a month more than the typical American job. At that distance the entry requirement is the real subject, because it is what the premium is buying.
57,720 people are employed as English Language and Literature 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.
This work suits people who want to spend a career inside one subject, teaching it while contributing to it, and who can tolerate an institution whose incentives do not always favour either.
How long it takes to become one of the 57,720 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
From $60,900 to $103,130 is $3,519 a month, or 1.7x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.
At $60,900, or $29.27 an hour, the 25th percentile sits $10,880 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 57,720 figure counts people already working as English Language and Literature 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 $60,900 and $103,130 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $78,760 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
In cash terms the middle half of English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary runs $60,900 to $103,130 — $42,230 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $78,760.
The 75th percentile is $103,130. Reaching it from the $78,760 midpoint is $24,370 a year; reaching it from the $60,900 that the bottom quarter of English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary earn is $42,230.
The climb from $78,760 to $103,130 is $24,370, against $17,860 down to $60,900. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary is larger than the realistic downside.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $29.27 at the bottom quarter, $37.86 at the midpoint, $49.58 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 $78,760 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.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary, the hourly figure is $78,760 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