California Ranks No. 9 for Teachers

Teachers Move Up Notch from 2025 when it Ranked 10th

With World Teachers’ Day around the corner and teachers making an average of 5% less per year than they did 10 years ago after adjusting for inflation, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its report on the Best & Worst States for Teachers in 2026, as well as expert commentary, in order to help educators find places to work with good teaching environments and above-average compensation.

WalletHub analyzed the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 24 key metrics, ranging from teachers’ income growth potential to the pupil-teacher ratio to public-school spending per student.

Teacher-Friendliness of California (1=Best; 25=Avg.):

Overall rank for California: 9th

• 6th – Avg. Salary for Teachers (Adjusted for Cost of Living)
• 16th – Public-School Spending per Student
• 29th – Teachers’ Income Growth Potential
• 5th – Projected Competition in Year 2034
• 13th – 10-Year Change in Teacher Salaries
• 1st – Existence of Digital Learning Plan

“Despite having one of the most crucial jobs in America – educating the next generation – teachers are often underpaid and underappreciated,” according to Chip Lupo, WalletHub analyst. “The states that make a teaching career the most rewarding are those that compensate educators well, invest heavily in educational resources, pass laws that improve school-system quality, and provide supportive conditions that lead to low turnover.”

Washington is the best state for teachers, in part because the pay situation is rapidly improving, Lupo writes in the report. “Washington has experienced the best change in teacher salaries over the past 10 years, with an increase of over 83%. The state now has the second-highest average annual salary, after adjusting for the cost of living, at $83,938 and the fourth-highest average starting salary, at $52,713. In addition, the state has passed various policies to make things in the classroom easier for teachers. For example, it’s one of only 27 states that require annual teacher evaluations, and it has a digital learning plan in place in case schools need to be closed.”

Expert Commentary

What are the biggest issues teachers face today?
 
“The Economic Policy Institute calculates that teachers earn roughly 27 percent less each week than other college graduates, a gap that has widened for decades, and AFT president Randi Weingarten has made that figure the center of the national argument for good reason. The average teacher salary did rise to about $74,500 in 2024-25, but after inflation, teachers’ real earnings have fallen roughly 5 percent since 2017. A raise that trails inflation is a pay cut with better publicity. The second issue is everything pay cannot fix: workloads that spill past contract hours, student behavior and mental health needs that arrived from the pandemic and never left, and a public discourse that treats teachers as combatants in culture wars they did not enlist for. The third issue is the downward morale spiral those first two produces. In a national Educators for Excellence poll, only 16 percent of teachers said they would recommend the profession to others. Every unhappy teacher is a recruiting office in reverse, talking to thirty potential future teachers all day long, and no marketing campaign can undo this reality.”
— Thomas J. Norman, Ph.D. – Professor California State University, Dominguez Hills

“First, we need to acknowledge that teaching (especially support) has drastically changed. Teachers are now required to, more than in the past, be mental health counselors/coaches, disciplinarians, special education experts, negotiation and conflict resolution specialists, and much more. Teachers are dealing with greater requirements, as illustrated by the list above, but also fewer resources. Parental support of teachers has consistently decreased which means behavioral and academic issues being addressed are less likely. This is leading to significant burnout.”
— Sean Walker, Ph.D., MBA – Professor of Management, University of Tennessee at Martin

How can local officials attract and retain the best teachers?

“Local officials should approach teacher retention as an employee-experience issue rather than focusing only on recruitment. Building a strong employee value proposition is key in creating jobs that people are attracted to and want to remain over the long-term. Competitive compensation and benefits are important. Teachers also need supportive leadership, manageable workloads, planning time, differentiated professional development, opportunities for advancement, and a meaningful voice in decisions. Communities can further distinguish themselves through student-loan programs, childcare support, and partnerships with local universities that create strong pathways into the profession.”
— Abbie Lambert, Ph.D. – Associate Professor, University of Central Oklahoma

“There are some obvious things that officials can do, such as new pathways into teaching for unrepresented groups, student loan forgiveness, raising compensation and signing bonuses, offering more opportunities for professional development and collaborative teaching, lowering the ratio of teachers to students, and ensuring that teachers have skilled student teachers, mental health professionals, and robust student support services in their classrooms and schools. Some less obvious but equally important things to consider are: 1) finding teachers that have strong roots in the local community and are committed to remaining in that community; 2) investing in teacher residency programs, including creating and maintaining strong and mutually beneficial partnerships with the institutions that are preparing teachers; and 3) providing teachers with dedicated time to reflect on and improve their work– preferably in the form of teacher inquiry and communities of practice.”
— Alice Ginsberg, Ph.D. – Associate Director for Research and Grant Development, Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, Rutgers University–New Brunswick

What are the major factors that contribute to the shortage of teachers in the U.S.? What will teacher shortages look like in 2026 and beyond?

“The factors compound: a 27 percent pay penalty on the front end, working conditions that consume the discount, and a morale spiral that does the counter-recruiting. But the structural fact most coverage misses is that this is a retention crisis wearing a recruitment costume. About 90 percent of open teaching positions are created by teachers leaving, most for reasons other than retirement, so districts pour recruits into a leaking bucket. In the talent framework I use in my management textbook, the shortage is a Rewarding and Retaining failure that shows up as an Attracting problem, and treating the symptom keeps failing because the root cause is elsewhere. Looking ahead, expect less a national crisis than fifty diverging experiments. Shortages are already concentrated by subject and by school: special education, math, and science, and the schools serving the lowest-income students, feel scarcity years before affluent suburbs notice. States that move real money and respect toward the profession will quietly exit the shortage. States that rely on emergency credentials will report full classrooms while quality erodes out of sight, because a warm body in the room does not show up as a vacancy. The honest metric for the next decade is retention of fully prepared teachers in high-need schools, and I would encourage rankings like this one to keep weighting it.”
— Thomas J. Norman, Ph.D. – Professor California State University, Dominguez Hills

“One factor to consider is that the cost of higher education is rising, while teacher pay does not appear to be keeping up with that increase. Emerging professionals have to consider this in their career choices and ask if they can support themselves after graduation. We also know we’re facing an enrollment cliff related to the total number of people who could go to college, and that’s becoming exacerbated by the number of people choosing not to go and opting into other fields. These are just two factors, but their visibility makes them easier to begin to address. Looking at immediate teacher shortages, say, over the next five years, I will ask again: What geographic area of the U.S. are we referring to? Place and the local issues that place is experiencing are a key factor in workforce growth or shortages. For example, in the early days of the oil and gas boom in Northern Appalachia, many districts in states like Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania began to experience a shortage of bus drivers because drivers were changing industries for better pay.”
— Jacqueline Yahn, Ed.D. – Associate Professor, Ohio University