Wake County teachers earn less on average than their peers in comparable southeastern metropolitan areas, a WRAL News data analysis shows. That’s despite a recent state budget that drastically boosted early career teacher pay and provided more modest pay increases for more experienced teachers.
The state provides the vast majority of teacher compensation in North Carolina. Counties provide some, but relatively small, add-ons to teacher pay. School districts in the state have no taxing authority, unlike in many other nearby states, so they alone cannot raise funds to increase teacher pay. Other states also contribute to teacher salaries, and North Carolina’s neighboring states pay more to first-year teachers or more to later-career teachers, or both.
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The salary schedule data shows a gap simply too large to have been overcome by state lawmakers’ significant pay raises for teachers this year and any accompanying county boost.
Wake teachers are earning several thousand dollars less per year than they would if they worked in a different southeastern community with a similar cost of living. Wake, along with Charlotte-Mecklenburg, is consistently one of the highest-paying school districts in North Carolina.
The gap coincides with an ever-present struggle for Wake — and many other school districts — to recruit teachers into its workforce. The district has a growing number of alternatively licensed teachers and perpetual classroom vacancies, although leaders believe they are better off than most others in North Carolina.
Wake Superintendent Robert Taylor echoed that sentiment in an interview with WRAL. He said Wake teachers earn higher salaries than others across the state.
“Look at the things that we've done in terms of teacher pay at a local level to make sure that we're properly compensated,” Taylor said. “And so what I recognize is that when teachers are compensated appropriately, then that will attract them to your district.”
The consequences are frustrating to parents, students and even other teachers. Complaints have accused the district’s special education teacher shortage of violating disabled students’ rights. Students have ended up with a revolving door of teachers in a single year, or sometimes several who team up to oversee one class that they may not teach, causing complaints about consistency.
That happened to Stacey de Coster’s daughter, Eleanor, who was accused of using artificial intelligence to write an essay, an accusation leveled by a teacher tasked with grading an English class they did not teach.
“They would have a substitute in the classroom, but no one doing lessons or anything like that, and so the kids would basically be reading in class, doing some assignments, and then other teachers would grade,” de Coster said. “We were like, ‘OK, that's not a great solution,’ but it was their long-term solution, and so it did cause some problems.”
Eleanor, who attends Green Hope High, would get only numeric grades for her coursework, no feedback. When she was accused of dishonesty and given a 0, Eleanor protested and was given a 100 by another teacher, without any comments.
De Coster said the school has good teachers and that the whole situation is complicated.
“I can understand why teachers are leaving, given how devalued they are sort of in terms of pay and everything else,” de Coster said. She knows she’s lucky because the school is overall good and has a good reputation. “We're experiencing this gap in my daughter's learning. What are less advantaged schools experiencing?”
Earning hundreds of thousands less over a career
WRAL News compared the Wake County Public School System’s salary schedule to those of school districts in five other nearby metropolitan areas — Atlanta, Nashville, Richmond, Virginia Beach and Jacksonville — that U.S. Census Bureau data showed had similar costs of living. Atlanta is home to three school systems. The other cities have one each.
Before the state pay increases, a Wake teacher earned about $48,000 to start. After 30 years, they’d make $70,000.
National average teacher pay was $74,500 during the 2024-25 school year, according to the National Education Association, which accounts for pay outside of the typical salary schedule.
A Wake teacher earning the average salary on the pay scale would have earned 4% to 25% less than a teacher earning the average salary on the pay scale in the eight other school districts, or $2,800 to $20,000 less in a year.
Over a 30-year career, if the salary schedules never changed, a Wake teacher would have earned, again, 4% to 25% less. That’s $88,000 to $617,000 less over the 30-year period.
The state pay increases and the school board’s planned 1% increase to the local salary supplement would push earnings in Wake County past only Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville. Wake starting teacher pay would be about $55,000, and 30-year teacher pay would be about $73,000. Compared to the other districts, Wake would be 8% to 21% behind in average salary and career earnings, by $5,500 to $17,000 annually and $172,000 to $526,000 over a career.
The Wake County Public School System now wants to hold off on giving the 1% supplement increase to save about $1.9 million this year. The district needs more than $17 million additional dollars this fall than originally budgeted for, because it needs to match the salaries of its 4,000 locally funded employees to match the salary increases of the state-funded employees. A final decision on the raises is expected later this month
This past school year, Wake had between 100 and 200 teacher vacancies at any given time, data shows.
That’s down from 200 to 300 just a couple of years ago, but that improvement isn’t exactly because hiring has gotten easier.
The district has 600 to 700 fewer teaching positions, filled or unfilled. But enrollment hasn’t dropped.
What an average 8% raise adds up to
The average 8% raise approved by state lawmakers, which is soon to be reflected in Wake teachers’ salaries, amounts to a cost-of-living adjustment for more experienced teachers, said Eric Houck, an associate education professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Those teachers are earning just 5% raises over their 2024-25 school year salaries.
The teacher workforce in general is much younger or less experienced than it used to be, with teachers having less and less experience, Houck said.
The state salary scale acknowledges that to an extent by providing more pay increases to earlier-career teachers, who are also the most likely to get burned out and quit, Houck said. It also reflects some outdated ideas about who the most effective teachers are, he said.
“The common wisdom used to be that teachers get really good in the first three or four years,” Houck said. “They sort of hit their potential and then ride a plateau for a long chunk of their middle to late careers. I think there's newer research that sort of complicates that story.”
Effectiveness scores published by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction show higher effectiveness among more experienced teachers. Teachers with lower effectiveness scores are more likely to leave than those with higher effectiveness scores. Additional research suggests a quality teacher is potentially the most important in-school factor in a student’s success.
Reversing the shortage
Taylor, the Wake superintendent, believes teacher support is critical toward making a school a place a teacher wants to stay.
“What keeps a teacher in your district is the professional development and support that you provide to them,” Taylor said. “We would put that support up against any district in this country.”
Districts across the state have been making smaller-scale compensation changes that double as larger-scale support changes.
One way to compensate for the trend of less experienced teachers is to use higher-paid teacher leaders — experienced and effective teachers — to mentor and provide instructional support to earlier-career teachers. In North Carolina, that’s done as a part of the Advanced Teaching Roles program, which North Carolina State University researchers have found is making a positive impact on schools. Long a far more popular program than the state had funding to support, lawmakers this summer approved $30 million more for the program so that more schools can participate in it.
As schools try to hire and retain teachers, they’re running up against the private sector, which has begun to realize the skillset and work ethic of teachers, Houck said.
“You have this sort of give and take of more people are coming in because licensure requirements have been loosened, but you also see the tug of other types of jobs, especially in
the education sector,” Houck said. “Corporations want educators to help them lead corporate training. There's a ton of edutechnology companies that want the expertise of teachers.”
The state has for decades had a shortage of math and science teachers, but people with math and science skills may pursue higher-paying career paths. Some math and science teachers have quit to pursue entry-level private sector jobs where they can make more immediately or very soon.
Increasing North Carolina’s starting teacher pay is a good step, Houck said, but lawmakers should consider their capacity to spend on education relative to the state’s gross domestic product. The state’s spending on education relative to its gross domestic product ranks at the bottom nationally.
“It means we're a very productive state. Our gross domestic product is growing. We've been very successful in that space,” Houck said. “But we're not really turning that productivity into reinvestment in education.”
Counties have the ability — just like local governments across the country — to raise teacher pay with local supplements intended to address the cost of living unique to their area. Those adjustments are more often based on political will for property tax increases than the actual need, Houck said.
Meanwhile, county residents and school parents like Stacy de Coster feel the impact of the teacher shortage.
When her daughter was facing a mishmash of English teachers, de Coster reached out to mom groups online and asked if they’d experienced this.
She got a lot of responses from moms who had.
Some hired private math tutors after their children’s math teachers quit. They were worried that, in a subject in which lessons build each day, that their children would fall behind and struggle with subsequent math classes.
But a public education should be free, de Coster said, and the state should ensure it’s good enough by paying teachers more.
“Taking care of the teachers is taking care of our students,” she said. “If we were paying teachers, I suspect [Eleanor] would have a teacher.”