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NEA Report

Teacher Salary Benchmarks

NEA's Teacher Salary Benchmark Report provides information from nearly 12,000 local school districts on starting teacher salaries and salaries at other points of the teaching career continuum.
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Published: April 26, 2022
This resource originally appeared on NEA.org

The average starting teacher salary for 2020-2021 was $41,770, an increase of 1.4% over 2019-2020. When adjusted for inflation, this represents a 4% decrease from 2019-2020, undoing all the gains made over the previous two years. 

Fueled by Red for Ed, starting salaries had nearly caught up to inflation after persistently lagging in the decade following the Great Recession. However, uncertainty brought on by the pandemic and high inflation following the reopening of the economy has sunk real salaries to their lowest levels since NEA began tracking teacher salary benchmarks more than a decade ago. 

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