Methodology

Teacher Pay

Arizona’s ranking compared to other states for median Arizona elementary teacher salary.

Sources

Included in this number

Median pay for district, charter, and private school elementary teachers, except for special education teachers. Median pay for public and private school secondary teachers, except for special education and career/technical education teachers. These numbers are adjusted to compensate for the regional cost of living. Included in these wage estimates are base salary, cost-of-living allowances, incentive pay, and several other items.

Not included in this number

Preschool, special education, career and technical teachers, teacher’s aides, or administrators. Overtime pay, stock bonuses, and year-end bonuses are excluded from the calculation of wages. A complete description of the BLS definition of wages can be found at: https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm#def.

In brief

Median Elementary and secondary (high school) teacher pay is compared in Arizona, three neighboring Western states, and the nation as a whole. Approximately half of Arizona teachers earn more than this amount, and half earn less.

Median teacher pay is also compared to several other occupations that also require a bachelor’s degree and to median pay for the total workforce. This data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

To provide a more accurate comparison across states, the BLS figures are adjusted by the Regional Price Parities published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This adjustment compensates for higher or lower cost-of-living in some areas.

Detailed methods

Data on salaries for 800 occupations are collected by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics through the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program. Both national and state-level files were downloaded from https://www.bls.gov/oes/. 

The data released in April 2025 for this metric are an aggregate of six panels of survey data collected over 3 years, resulting in a sample size of ~1.1 million establishments. Of the establishments within the scope and in operation, approximately 698,000 responded, yielding a 65.7% response rate. The weighted sample response rate is 65.9%. Detailed methods and reliability information for the OEWS Survey can be found here.

Note about updated methods per the BLS: “With the May 2021 estimates, the OEWS program switched to a new model-based estimation method called MB3. Additional changes to the wage estimation methodology were made with the May 2022 estimates. These wage processing changes include using reported wage rates, if available, to represent private sector and local government employers, instead of placing the wage data into 12 wage intervals.

Research shows that MB3 produces better quality estimates than the previous estimation method, as described in the Monthly Labor Review article “Model-Based Estimates for the Occupational Employment Statistics program.” Details of the MB3 estimation method as currently implemented are discussed in the “Calculation” section of this document.”

The 2016-2024 teacher pay analyses are updated and use the MB3 BLS OEWS data. 

The occupations and their Standard Occupation Codes (SOC) selected for comparison are as follows:

OccupationSOC
All Occupations00-0000
Accountants and Auditors13-2011
Civil Engineers17-2051
Elementary School Teachers, except special education25-2021
Secondary School Teachers, except special and career/technical ed25-2031
Occupational Therapists29-1122
Physician Assistants29-1071

Annual median wage was extracted for each of these occupations for the nation and 49 states. 

At the time of release of the 2024 OEWS, data from Colorado were excluded due to quality concerns. This data may be released at a later date. This exclusion also impacts national estimates. (https://www.bls.gov/oes/notices/2024/colorado-data.htm)

A note on the BLS website addresses some concerns about using this data for year-to-year comparisons: “The OEWS survey methodology is designed to create detailed cross-sectional occupational employment and wage estimates by geographic area or industry, but it is less useful for looking at changes over time. Challenges in using OEWS data as a time series include changes in the occupational, industry, and geographic classification systems; changes in the OEWS methodology and data collection procedures; and permanent features of the OEWS methodology, including the three-year pooled sample design.” https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm#other)

With this in mind, these numbers are best used to compare teacher pay in Arizona relative to other occupations and to other states rather than looking at changes from one year to the next, which are likely not meaningful.

Unlike other measures of teacher pay, such as NCES or NEA, BLS data also captures salary information for Arizona charter school teachers, representing approximately 19 percent of the K-12 teaching workforce in Arizona.1

To adjust for local cost-of-living, Regional Price Parities (RPP) were downloaded from https://apps.bea.gov/itable/?ReqID=70&step=1 and applied to the median salaries reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These price parities were applied to the state-level median wages. Both the annual median wage and state rankings were reported for the seven occupations for Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and the United States.

Note about updated methods per the BEA: “The improved method was introduced in 2022 and uses a more detailed adjustment that includes utility expenditures on other fuels, such as heating oil or propane. These are important regionally, particularly in the northeastern states and Alaska. The adjustment is made to any observation where the payment for one or more utilities was included in the rent. Instead of removing estimated costs for all utilities, the improved adjustment only removes costs for the specific utilities included in each rent observation.

The distribution of the housing rent RPPs is similar both before and after these revisions. There is no change to the states in quintiles with the highest and lowest price levels, and there is some movement across the others. Maine had the largest downward revision with an RPP that drops from 82.8 to 71.5 (−13.6 percent). North Dakota had the largest upward revision from 71.7 to 77.0 (7.4 percent).

A second change made to the rents and utilities data was the incorporation of the ACS-based results for reference year 2020. Due to pandemic-related delays encountered at Census, BEA could not access the 2020 ACS PUMS in time for the December 2021 release. Instead, BEA used 2019 ACS PUMS results for the estimation of the 2020 RPPs. For the December 2022 release, BEA was able to access the 2020 ACS PUMS and used those results to estimate the RPPs.The final change is the adoption of price data for electricity and natural gas from EIA. Previously, the RPPs used CPI or ACS PUMS microdata to develop these estimates. However, CPI results are only available for a limited number of metropolitan areas and regions, and both sources required processing at BEA to develop state-level results. The EIA price levels, on the other hand, are published for all states and are publicly available on the EIA website”

  1.  “AZ School Report Cards,” Arizona Department of Education, 2023-2024 School Year. Retrieved April 14, 2025, https://azreportcards.azed.gov/state-reports. ↩︎