Skip to Content
  • Teacher Compensation
  • Unions & Contracts
  • Are teacher salaries keeping up with inflation?

    March 10, 2022

    More like this

    Endnotes
    1. Metropolitan Nashville
      Public Schools, the second largest school district in Tennessee, was used in
      place of their largest, Shelby County Schools, due to Shelby County’s lack of available
      salary schedules for all the years included in this analysis.
    2. The salary schedule used to establish this comparison is the “Rest of the U.S.” GS scale, which is the salary schedule that applies to federal employees in most of the U.S. except for those who reside in selected localities that, due to cost of living, require their own salary premiums. About a quarter of districts in this sample line up with localities with their own federal salary schedule, but for this analysis, we compare only against the “Rest of the U.S.” scale. In 2017, on average, the salary of teachers across the 51 large districts in this analysis during their first 20 years of experience roughly paralleled the “Rest of the U.S.” GS-9 scale for a similar number of years of service. Therefore, we examine the raise an average GS-9 employee would earn over this period. According to federal guidelines, an average performing employee starting in 2017 at GS-9 Step 1 would have been placed at GS-9 Step 4 in 2020. The frequency of step increases diminishes after 4 years of experience, and then again after another 6 years.
    3. This federal benchmark
      is compared to national inflation, while teachers’ raises are compared against
      inflation in their locality, so the benchmark provides context but does not
      reflect differences in federal employees’ purchasing power by locality.