Like she has done during past summers, Sarah Casey will put away the lesson plan folders and dry ink markers that she uses as a 4th-grade teacher in Maryland, to pick up extra work.
She’ll work as a nanny for a family in Carroll County, where she lives, shuttling children to and from camp during the week, and seat customers at a local pizza joint on the weekends. For Ms. Casey, these gigs aren’t just to make a little extra summer spending money. Bills are adding up and her teaching salary isn’t going as far as it used to. She just moved out of her parents’ house to an apartment with her fiance, and she’s getting married in September.
With inflation reaching its highest level in three years in May, teachers say pay increases won in recent years have already been eroded by surging prices. Many teachers are not only starting summer jobs, but also picking up work outside the classroom during the school year. The National Education Association, the largest teachers union, said earlier this year that due to inflation, public school teachers were making less on average today than they were in 2017.
Why We Wrote This
Teachers seeing inflation consume recent salary gains are turning to jobs outside the classroom to supplement their pay. The largest teachers union says public school teachers are making less than they did a decade ago when inflation is factored in.
Ms. Casey commutes 40 miles daily to work in more affluent Montgomery County outside Washington, D.C., where the pay is better, but she cannot afford the rent.
Healthcare costs are up. U.S. tariffs have made many products more expensive. The surge in gas prices since the United States went to war with Iran has been an additional hit.
“With gas right now, I’m filling up once a week, sometimes maybe more depending on where I’m going, but with just gas I’m spending $160 bucks on gas bi-weekly,” she says.
Inflation roars
Low teacher pay is a perennial issue, but inflation, which rose 4.2% in May from a year earlier – its highest level in three years – is wiping out recent salary gains.
According to an NEA report published in April, the average public school teacher salary rose 3.5% to $74,495 in 2024-25 from $71,985 in the 2023-24 school year. But adjusted for inflation, teachers earn about 5% less now than they did 10 years ago, the report said.
“This has been chronic forever,” says NEA President Becky Pringle. “We didn’t go into this job to make money, but we also didn’t go into this job to not be able to take care of our own families.”
James Foster is a high school social studies teacher in Idaho with 31 years of experience, including 28 in Blaine County, where he currently works. He has consistently worked second jobs during the school year over that time, related and unrelated to school, including coaching.
In December, he began working for an airline at the regional airport serving the Sun Valley ski resort, to get cheaper tickets for his daughter to fly to and from college during her freshman year.
“My income in 2017 probably bought me more stuff than it does in 2026,” says Mr. Foster.
Mr. Foster works 12 to 15 hours at the airport while school is in, mostly on weekend shifts, but sometimes on evenings. He also works in the summer for three weeks helping with activities for a local annual conference. It all helps.
“I remember when I was planning for $25,000 a year for my daughter (to attend college) and now it’s more than double that,” he says. “Six or seven years ago I was getting my brain around how I wanted to save for that, and also stopping work at some point. But I was calculating that the district would keep the salary schedule up with inflation, but we haven’t.”
Help wanted
Pew Research reported last year that for the 2020-21 school year – the most recent available data at the time – 16% of full-time public school teachers worked a nonschool job over the summer. Data showed that it was more common for teachers earlier in their careers and that the percentage had remained fairly consistent.
This month, RAND highlighted teachers holding outside jobs in its 2026 State of the American Teacher survey. It found that about 30% of teachers reported working outside jobs during the school year for, on average, about 13 hours per week.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
Elizabeth Steiner, who co-authored the RAND report, said the think tank started the survey in 2021 after the pandemic. She says 2026 was the first year that they asked teachers about working second jobs during the school year. But in the 2021 National Teacher and Principal survey, about 17% of public school teachers said they worked outside jobs.
The report also noted that teachers were more likely to report experiencing poor well-being than other similar working adults.
“Teachers’ reports of well-being are highly correlated with their pay and their working hours. They are also correlated with lots of other things,” she says.
Some of those things are working conditions, relationships with principals, the number of job-related stressors that come with teaching, including student behavior and the amount of time spent on classroom management, how collegial their colleagues are, work life-balance and benefits.
Teacher well-being is tied to multiple indicators, Ms. Steiner says, with pay being one of them. The economy as a whole and their ability to find different employment are others.
Dr. Michael Hansen, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, has written about teacher pay over the years, and once thought that teacher stress was no more than that felt by other professions.
“But I’ve now seen enough new evidence that has made me reconsider that position and I am convinced that working conditions are getting worse for teachers,” Dr. Hansen says via email.
He says that conditions are worse in specific areas associated with school and community disadvantages and that they’ve deteriorated since the pandemic.
Teachers have long taken on summer work of some kind, he says. But the trend of educators adding second shifts during the school year is worrisome. “Summer work seems like an issue that school district employers probably have little real concern for,” says Dr. Hansen. “Now, if the question is about working a second job during the school year, I feel there’s good reason for districts to be more concerned about that.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
Filling gaps
Ms. Pringle, of the teachers union, says that the federal government has to step in. Typically, public schools depend on local property taxes, state funding and federal grants, but many states are facing holes in their budgets due to federal cuts to programs like Medicaid.
“States are making decisions about how they’re going to find those funds, and where do they go? Education funding,” Ms. Pringle says.
Dr. Hansen says one solution would be to make the premium salaries for teachers with advanced degrees available to all teachers, regardless of education level. School districts should not incentivize teachers to go into debt for a degree that does not appear to impact their ability to serve students better, he says. Bonuses for teaching in high-need settings and subjects should be universal in those places, and if merit bonuses cannot be given, highly effective teachers should be made eligible for expanded roles and titles, which come with higher salaries.
But there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, because not all school districts are falling behind in paying their teachers based on national teacher salary data, he says. “We should not be trying to pay all teachers more because not all teachers are really that behind in earnings based on the current state of affairs.”
Anthony Swinton, a rising senior at Morgan State University, is an education major who is keen to teach. He will help fill the need for new teachers and help add to the ranks of Black male teachers. Despite knowing his starting salary will be $40,000 to $50,000 and hearing that he’ll have to work summers to augment pay, he still wants to do it.
He says his 5th-grade teacher was someone who really connected with him, but later he did not find that kind of mentoring and got expelled in middle school for goofing around. To those who wonder why he would pay thousands for college to earn so little, he has a ready response.
“That field can change lives.”