What Teachers, Nurses, and Plumbers Actually Earn

On a Tuesday in February, a seventh-year third-grade teacher in Boise opened her district's pay portal and found the same number that had been there since her last step increase: $54,538. Fourteen hundred miles away, a registered nurse in Birmingham finished a 12-hour night shift and checked her electronic stub before driving home — $1,085 gross for the week, unchanged since her hospital's last market adjustment in 2023. In Boston, a journeyman plumber replaced a water heater in a Back Bay basement and was credited $148 for the Saturday call, time and a half billed through his union local.

The three paychecks come from different machines: a public-employee salary schedule, a hospital compensation grid, a union contract. That is the point. National averages — the average teacher, the average nurse, the average plumber — flatten three distinct labor markets into a single figure that describes no one. The average teacher salary is pulled up by California and down by Mississippi. The average nurse's pay mixes an intensive-care nurse in San Jose with a clinic nurse in rural Alabama. The average plumber blends a union journeyman in Chicago with a non-union apprentice in Phoenix.

This article reports what the wage data show about the three occupations the pandemic years made into household words: where the pay is high, where it is low, and why the gaps inside each profession are often wider than the gaps between them. The numbers come from the National Education Association's annual rankings of state teacher salaries, the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational wage survey, and union scale rates published by locals and training funds. It matters now because all three markets are short of workers — schools, hospitals, and construction — and shortages are rewriting pay in real time. The short version: for all three, where you work and the setting you work in decide more about your pay than the job title does.

Teacher pay: a map of state choices

Start with the map, because for teachers the state is the paymaster. The National Education Association's most recent rankings put the average public-school teacher salary at about $72,000 a year. California leads at roughly $95,000, with New York near $93,000 and Massachusetts close behind. At the other end sit Mississippi at about $49,000, West Virginia near $52,000, and Florida at about $53,000. The spread between the top and bottom states is roughly $46,000 — the difference between a house and a two-bedroom apartment, or between a district that covers family health premiums and one that does not.

The persistence of the gap is partly arithmetic and partly politics. Teacher pay is set through state funding formulas, local property taxes, and, in a minority of states, collective bargaining that is restricted or banned outright. Where bargaining is weak, salaries move only when legislatures move them, which is why recession-era cuts from 2009 and 2010 are still visible at the bottom of the table a decade and a half later. Adjusted for inflation, the NEA calculates, the average teacher salary has fallen about 5 percent over the past decade even as the nominal figure set records.

Geography cuts the other way too. A Mississippi teacher's $49,000 goes further than a Californian's $95,000 — BLS regional price data show California prices run roughly a fifth above the national average — but not nearly far enough to close a $46,000 gap. Housing is the quiet variable: in the districts around San Jose and Los Angeles, a salary that looks generous on paper disappears into a mortgage payment a Mississippi colleague would never face. Cost of living explains some of the map; it does not explain the map.

The classroom numbers the average hides

Two numbers matter more than the state average, and both are lower than the headlines suggest. The first is the starting salary. The national average is about $44,500, the NEA reports, and in a dozen states a new teacher starts below $40,000. The second is the step schedule: pay climbs in published increments for years of service and graduate credits, and the same number applies to every teacher at the same step, regardless of the subject taught or the difficulty of the classroom.

The flatness of the schedule is doing real work in the shortage. Districts short on math, science, and special-education teachers have bolted stipends and signing bonuses onto the structure, and a handful of states, including Alabama and Arkansas, have raised minimum teacher salaries in the past two years. The structure survives. The Boise teacher, who has taught third grade for seven years, said her pay for the coming school year was set two years ago, by a board that meets without her in the room. "The schedule is the schedule," she said. "There is no negotiation. You wait for the legislature."

She supplements: summer school, tutoring two evenings a week, and a district stipend for mentoring a first-year teacher down the hall. Count the extra work and her effective hourly rate is closer to $28 than to the $26 the annual salary implies for a 185-day contract year — and the summer is unpaid either way. The annual figure is real money; the annual figure is not the whole job.

Nurses: setting, shift, and city

Registered nursing is the rare occupation whose national median is close to a real person's paycheck: about $89,000 a year, in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent occupational wage survey. The spread around that median is what the headlines miss. Nurse practitioners, who hold graduate degrees and can prescribe independently in most states, earn a median of roughly $128,000. Nurse anesthetists, the highest-paid clinical role in nursing, clear $200,000. Licensed practical nurses, who carry much of the bedside load in nursing homes and home health, sit in the mid-$50,000s.

Even inside the registered-nurse title, pay splits three ways: by setting, by shift, and by city. Hospitals pay the most — BLS industry data put hospital nurses at about $98,000 on average — with outpatient clinics below that and nursing care facilities below them. Night and weekend differentials add $4 to $6 an hour in most markets, and short-staffed units pay incentive premiums that can double a shift's rate.

The city effect is bigger than all of it. In the San Jose metro, registered nurses average about $160,000, the BLS reports, with San Francisco close behind. In the lowest-paying Southern metros, the same occupation averages under $70,000. A nurse recruiter in Birmingham who has placed intensive-care and emergency nurses for 15 years said geography is the first question she asks every candidate. "A nurse with two years of ICU experience can negotiate in California," she said. "In Alabama, she waits for a step increase, and she knows it."

The nursing specialties that pay

The pandemic briefly flattened that map. Travel-nurse rates passed $100 an hour in the worst months of 2021 and 2022, and nurses from low-paying states flew to high-paying hospitals for 13-week contracts at rates that dwarfed their staff pay. The premium has compressed since 2023, staffing-industry data show, with typical travel pay back near $60 to $70 an hour — still far above staff rates in much of the South, and a standing temptation for the nurses who staff Birmingham's floors.

Specialty moves the number more than effort does. A nurse who completes an operating-room or emergency-department orientation adds several dollars an hour to her rate; a nurse who earns a certification in critical care adds more; a nurse who goes back for a graduate degree changes jobs entirely, from the $89,000 median of the staff nurse to the $128,000 median of the nurse practitioner. The ladder is the profession's best-kept secret, the recruiter said, because it is visible inside every hospital and invisible in most coverage of nursing pay.

The bottom of the ladder is where the strain shows. Licensed practical nurses and certified nursing assistants — the workers who turn patients, answer call lights, and staff the night shift in nursing homes — have seen the fastest-growing demand and the slowest-growing pay of any group in health care, which is one reason the occupation's churn is so high. The pay data describe the top of the profession well; they describe the floor of it poorly.

Plumbers and the apprenticeship pipeline

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median plumber, pipefitter, or steamfitter at about $64,000 a year — above the roughly $50,000 median for all occupations, and far above what the title suggests to anyone who remembers the trades being described as a fallback. Where union scale is strong and overtime is regular, the occupation pays like a profession. In Anchorage and New York, average pay runs above $85,000, and a journeyman on a strong local's scale card — near $60 an hour and above in New York and San Francisco — clears six figures with a normal amount of Saturday work.

The route in is the registered apprenticeship, and it is the profession's quiet advantage: no tuition, no student debt, and a paycheck from the first week. The Department of Labor counts more than half a million active registered apprentices, the most in decades, and the plumbing and pipefitting trades run some of the largest programs. Apprentices start at 50 to 60 percent of the journeyworker rate and receive a raise roughly every six months or 1,000 hours, so a five-year program ends at full scale with a state license and, for union members, a pension and health plan funded by the employer.

A business manager in Boston who has negotiated plumbing and pipefitting contracts for two decades calls the apprenticeship the best financial aid program in the country. He asked not to be identified because his local does not comment publicly on wages.

"It is the closest thing to a free college degree that pays you to attend. You come out with a license, a health plan, a pension, and no debt."

The limits are real. About 2 percent of plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters are women, one of the widest gender gaps in the American labor force, and the industry has spent a decade trying to close it with pre-apprenticeship programs and recruiting campaigns. Non-union work pays less and varies widely by region and contractor. And the work is cyclical: when construction slows, hours disappear before pay does, which is why the annual figure flatters a journeyman who worked 2,400 hours and punishes one who worked 1,600.

The same five jobs, three cities

Set the three professions side by side in three cities and the averages dissolve into something more useful. The table below draws on BLS metropolitan wage data, state teacher salary schedules, and union scale rates; the figures are rounded and should be read as approximations, not offers.

Approximate annual pay for five roles in three metros, rounded from BLS, state, and union data

Role	Boston	Boise	Birmingham
Elementary school teacher	$88,000	$55,000	$54,000
Registered nurse, hospital	$105,000	$85,000	$75,000
Licensed practical nurse	$65,000	$52,000	$46,000
Plumber, journeyman	$95,000	$62,000	$55,000
Electrician, journeyman	$100,000	$66,000	$58,000

Read across any row and the city premium is plain: the same job pays 30 to 60 percent more in Boston than in Birmingham. Read down a column and the professions sort themselves differently in each place. In Birmingham, a teacher and a journeyman plumber earn nearly the same. In Boston, the trades outearn the classroom by $10,000 or more. In Boise, a hospital nurse clears a third-grade teacher by $30,000. The national average for any of these occupations sits somewhere in the middle of rows like these, describing no actual city and no actual person.

The hours the paycheck hides

Annual figures also hide how the work is paid for. A teacher's $55,000 in Boise buys a contract year of about 185 days — roughly $297 a day — with the summer unpaid, which is why teachers who want full-year income tutor, drive for delivery apps, or take district summer-school shifts. Divide the salary by the hours a 50-hour school week consumes and the effective rate falls well below what the annual number implies. The same calculation runs the other way for nurses and plumbers, whose pay is built on shifts and hours that can be added.

A nurse's $85,000 in Boise assumes 12-hour shifts three or four days a week, with differentials on top. A plumber's $64,000 assumes 40 hours, and the occupation's real earnings show up in time and a half after 40 and double time on Saturdays — or not at all in a slow quarter. The overtime math is worth running before comparing any two offers, and so is the salary-to-hourly conversion: an annual figure without the hours behind it is a headline, not a comparison.

Benefits separate the three professions too. Most public-school teachers and most union tradespeople still accrue defined-benefit pensions; most hospital nurses rely on 401(k)-style plans. A teacher in a state with a funded pension system is accruing deferred pay that the salary figure does not show, and a union plumber's package — scale plus health and pension contributions — routinely runs 30 percent above the check. The teacher in Boise and the plumber in Boston are both, in effect, paid twice: once now, and once later, on terms a hospital nurse's plan may not match.

What the next few years look like

Three forces will move these paychecks in the next few years, and they are moving in the same direction: up, though at different speeds. Teacher pay is a statehouse issue again. After a decade of real-terms decline, states from Arkansas to Alabama have raised minimum salaries, and the vacancy pressure that pushed emergency credentials to records in several states has not fully abated. The NEA expects the state-by-state gap to narrow slowly as low-paying states play catch-up — not because the top states are stagnating, but because the bottom ones are being dragged upward by politics as much as by budgets.

Nursing demand is demographic and essentially mechanical. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 194,000 registered-nurse openings a year through 2033 as the baby-boom generation ages into the health system and older nurses retire. Hospitals that cannot staff beds will keep paying premiums, which is why the salary calculators on this site are most useful for nurses comparing metro markets rather than employers. The trades are expanding their pipeline from the other end: the Department of Labor has pushed registered apprenticeships to record levels, and states are funding pre-apprenticeship programs in high schools, which is how the next generation of plumbers will be recruited.

None of this changes the underlying arithmetic, which is that your pay is set by your state, your setting, your shift, and your contract — not by the national average. The useful numbers are public. A district's salary schedule is published before a school year begins. A hospital's pay grid is not, but the BLS wage survey shows what its metro and industry pay, and recruiters will usually state a range once a candidate asks. A union's scale card is posted by the local. The teacher in Boise, the nurse in Birmingham, and the plumber in Boston will all see their numbers move in the next two years — by legislative vote, by hospital budget, by contract. Whether the movement passes them or lifts them is largely a question of where they work and what they ask for, and the data to answer it are already public.