Teacher Salary In Kentucky

Teachers in Kentucky make an average of $47,000 a year. This is a little lower than the national average for teachers, which is around $54,000.

The highest-paying school districts in Kentucky are located in Louisville and Lexington. They offer salaries of up to $95,000 per year.

Kentucky teachers also receive benefits such as retirement plans and health insurance reimbursement.

Average Teacher Salary

What grade are you teaching? What school are you working in? These are the biggest initial factors in determining the average salary of a teacher will look like.

When the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) updates its occupational employment statistics, it breaks up schoolteachers into categories. The three broadest categories they use are elementary school teachers, middle school teachers and secondary school teachers, which we more colloquially refer to as high school teachers. It can’t provide hourly wages, as the role of a teacher isn’t technically a year-round position, but annual wages are reported.

Average Elementary School Teacher Salary

Per the BLS, in May of 2018 elementary school teachers, a wide umbrella for those who teach elementary level education to kids (excluding special education, a separate occupation with its own set of skills), had a median annual income of $58,230.

This number would be above the average salary in the U.S., but it’s the median of an awfully wide range of salaries. Elementary school teachers in the bottom 10% of income only made around $37,780, while those in the highest 10% could make as much as $95,270.

The overwhelming majority of the 1.41 million elementary school teachers used to find these figures worked in elementary or K-12 schools. The second-highest concentration (a very distant second) of them were employed in religious organizations – 2,510 teachers as compared to the 1.4 million in elementary/secondary schools. The mean annual wage for elementary school teachers at these religious organizations was $53,230.

Kindergarten is seen as a separate teaching role by the BLS as well. The median annual salary for kindergarten teachers was $55,470.

Average Middle School Teacher Salary

Middle school teachers aren’t as plentiful as elementary school teachers in the U.S. – the BLS counted 609,970 of them – but they make, on average, a slightly higher salary than elementary school teachers. The median salary of these middle school teachers (again excluding special education teachers, as well as career/technical education) in May of 2018 was $58,600.

The salary range of middle school teachers is fairly similar to that of elementary school ones. The floor is slightly higher, as the bottom 10% make around $39,090. Interestingly, however, the ceiling isn’t quite as high as that of elementary school; the highest 10% of middle school teachers made $93,180.

Unsurprisingly, the states with the largest amount of middle school teachers employed tend to be among the more heavily populated ones. Texas is first by a wide margin with 66,470, followed by California with 46,500. New York comes in at a fairly distant third with 39,950 middle school teachers.

Average High School Teacher Salary

With approximately 1.05 million of them in the U.S., there are considerably more high school teachers than middle school teachers, and they continue the incremental progress of slightly higher salaries the higher the grades you teach. The median annual wages for high school teachers (special and technical education excluded) was $60,320 in May of 2018.

The bottom and top 10% of high school teachers each make more than their elementary and middle school counterparts; the 10th percentile of high school teachers make $39,740 while the 90th percentile (the highest 10%) makes $97,500.

Thousands of secondary school teachers do their job for local and state governments, and it appears to be one of the more lucrative industries for teachers. The 1,490 high school teachers in the local government have a mean annual wage of $56,490, while the 1,460 in state government had a mean annual wage of $72,340.