The Teacher Pay Penalty Hit 25.2 Percent in 2025. Counselors Are Paying It Too.

Every fall, someone in your building says the same thing: teaching does not pay what it used to, but at least the gap is closing. The Economic Policy Institute just published the number that ends that sentence for good. In 2025, teachers earned 25.2 percent less than similarly educated professionals in other fields. That is down from a record 26.9 percent the year before, which sounds like progress until you remember that in 1996 the gap was 6.1 percent. The penalty has more than quadrupled in three decades, and it did not stop at the classroom door. If you are a school counselor, school psychologist, or other credentialed staff member sitting on the same negotiated salary schedule as your building’s teachers, and in most districts you are, this is not somebody else’s bad news. It is your contract.

The Number, and Three Decades of Drift

The 25.2 percent figure comes from a joint report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), released this week. It measures the gap between what teachers earn weekly and what similarly educated college graduates earn in other professions. Adjusted for inflation, public school teachers’ weekly wages have fallen 6.2 percent over the past thirty years. Wages for other college graduates rose 28.8 percent over the same stretch. Even after accounting for the stronger benefits packages public employees typically receive, the total compensation penalty still sat at 14.5 percent in 2025.

The gap is not uniform. Rhode Island has the smallest penalty in the country at 10.4 percent. Colorado has the largest at 40.7 percent, and eleven states now carry a penalty above 30 percent. Twenty five states are at 25 percent or worse. Wherever your district sits on that map, the report’s author has a blunt read on what the trend means.

“The decades-long teacher pay penalty has taken a heavy toll on public education. Yet, policymakers have failed to make the needed investments to reverse course. That failure is especially troubling in a country as wealthy as the United States, with more than enough resources for its public schools to be the envy of the world.” Sylvia Allegretto, Economic Policy Institute (2026)

Your Salary Schedule Does Not Ask What Degree You Have

EPI’s data set is built around classroom teachers, but the salary schedule most districts use does not sort by job title. It sorts by degree and years of service. A school counselor with a master’s degree and state licensure sits on the same step and lane as a teacher with the same credentials, in the overwhelming majority of districts nationwide. The pay penalty is not a teacher problem. It is whatever your grid says it is, for everyone on the grid.

That should sound familiar. This blog has spent the summer tracking what happens when the people on that schedule leave faster than districts can replace them: caseloads climbing past national ratios, therapists stretched across three buildings, counselor positions absorbed while student need keeps rising. A pay penalty of this size is not a side effect of that staffing crisis. It is upstream of it. An earlier issue of the newsletter this year found that when counselors say they are thinking about leaving the field, they rarely name pay as the reason. This data suggests pay is quietly funding all the other reasons anyway: the extra job on weekends, the veteran staff who burn out and do not get replaced, the applicant pool that never fully forms.

The report also breaks the gap out by gender, and the pattern should matter to a profession that is roughly three quarters women. In 1960, female teachers actually earned 14.7 percent more than other female college graduates. That premium is gone. EPI now puts the erosion at 34.7 percent. Male teachers have never had a premium to lose. Their penalty has grown from 20.5 percent in 1960 to 34.5 percent today, which is a large part of why so few men enter the profession, or the counseling office, at all.

A Federal Rule Could Tighten the Pipeline Further

The timing is awkward. The Department of Education’s new Student Tuition and Transparency System rule requires graduate programs to show their alumni out earn a typical bachelor’s degree holder, or risk losing eligibility for federal Direct Loans if they fail that bar in two out of three consecutive award years. Counselor preparation programs, like teacher preparation programs, produce graduates who took on a master’s degree and a licensure exam for a salary schedule that is now documented to run a quarter behind the market. Nobody has flagged counseling programs specifically yet. But the math that makes a teacher-prep program vulnerable to this rule is the same math sitting under most school counseling programs, and it is worth watching before it becomes the next item on your caseload of professional worries.

None of this fixes itself at the next school board meeting. But you do not need to wait for Washington to use the number. Pull your own state’s pay penalty from the EPI report before your next negotiation session, budget hearing, or advocacy letter, and put it next to your caseload data. A district that will not move on class size sometimes moves on a number that says, in writing, exactly how much it is asking you to subsidize the job. Bring the receipt.

Sources

• The Teacher Pay Penalty Remained High in 2025 — Economic Policy Institute, August 2026
• Report: Teachers Are Being Squeezed Financially — Forbes, August 2026
• The Teacher Pay Penalty Remained High in 2025 — Common Dreams, August 2026
• Map Shows Where Teacher Pay Is Best, Worst Versus Other Grad Jobs — Newsweek, August 2026
• U.S. Department of Education Issues Final Rule to Hold Colleges and Universities Accountable for Low-Earning Programs — U.S. Department of Education, 2026