Occupation / job
Teaching Assistants, Except 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 a $36,780 midpoint, Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary sits 26% under the $50,020 national figure. The shortfall is $1,103 a month, which is roughly the size of a rent difference between metros — worth checking before the job is the thing you blame.
1,420,350 people are employed as Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary, which puts it among the largest occupations in the United States. At this scale you are never short of a vacancy and never scarce, and the second fact is why the first one is cheap.
Instructional support roles suit people who want to work with students without carrying the planning, the assessment and the parental contact that the teaching post carries.
How long it takes to become one of the 1,420,350 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
The middle half runs $31,060 to $45,360 — $1,191 a month between the quarters, a 1.5x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.
The bottom quarter is under $31,060, $18,960 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.
Avoid it if you need year-round income; these posts commonly follow the school calendar and stop when it does.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 1,420,350 figure counts people already working as Teaching Assistants, Except 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
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.5x. In a band that narrow, $36,780 is a genuinely representative number for Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary and the main variable left is where you live.
In cash terms the middle half of Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary runs $31,060 to $45,360 — $14,300 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $36,780.
Getting to $45,360, the 75th percentile, is worth $8,580 a year more than the $36,780 midpoint and $14,300 more than the $31,060 a quarter of Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary settle for.
$8,580 separates $36,780 from the $45,360 top quarter, while only $5,720 separates it from $31,060. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $14.93 at the bottom quarter, $17.68 at the midpoint, $21.80 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Teaching Assistants, Except Postsecondary. The self-employed are excluded, so $36,780 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $36,780 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Teaching Assistants, Except 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