Teachers everywhere are taking a deep breath as summer winds down and a new school year begins. As teachers and students head back to the classroom, how are they feeling about the job and the profession? A new RAND survey of teachers seeks to provide an answer, digging into how teachers are doing and whether they plan to stay for another year.
In short, teachers are having a tough time, but most plan to stay in the classroom—at least for now. The nationally representative survey by Elizabeth D. Steiner, Phoebe Rose Levine, Sy Doan, and Ashley Woo reports data on over 1,400 public school teachers from earlier in 2025 and also includes a comparative sample of about 500 working adults in other professions.
Teachers report lower well-being than similar adults on every measure: job-related stress and difficulty coping with it, symptoms of depression, and burnout—although teachers’ well-being has improved a bit since the pandemic subsided. Not all teachers are equal: Job-related stress was higher for female teachers than male teachers and lower for Black teachers than for white and Hispanic teachers. Teachers report that their greatest source of stress by far is managing student behavior (top ranked by half of teachers), which matches up with other teacher surveys. Next on the list of reported top stressors is that teacher salaries are too low (39%).
But despite the stress they report, teachers are much less likely to plan to leave their job by the end of the school year—down to 16% from a high of 23% in the 2022–23 school year. Worth noting, while intent to leave is a useful gauge of how teachers feel about their jobs, and some of them do leave, it’s not a direct predictor of how many will turn in a letter of resignation. It’s unclear why this “intent to leave” measure is going down, as it could signal that teachers are more attached to their current jobs or that teachers are less certain of what opportunities await them outside school doors.
The news wasn’t all doom and gloom. One bright spot is that teachers aren’t working quite as much—an average of 49 hours per week, down from 53 a few years ago.
Since low salaries play a significant role in teachers’ stress (second behind student behavior), the study took a closer look at teachers’ self-reported compensation and benefits:
- In line with other research, teachers earn less than comparable adults in the survey by about $30,000. Some salary disparities worth noting are that Black teachers and female teachers report earning less than their white or male counterparts.
- Teachers with a master’s degree earn more than those with a bachelor’s by about $25,000, even more than the master’s degree premiums identified in a recent District Trendline. This may reflect higher pay due to having both advanced degrees and more experience, showing that the full cost for districts of these premiums can be quite steep.
- Teachers have less access to some key benefits than their non-teaching counterparts, including slightly less time off and notably less access to paid parental leave. Districts may be interested to know that when paid parental leave is available to teachers, only about a third use the benefit, but four in five teachers believe the benefit is adequate.
While the survey offers a sense of the national mood rather than how teachers are faring in any particular district, it does suggest some areas for education leaders at all levels to pay attention to. Identifying ways to recognize teachers’ hard work with compensation and benefits remains essential, as does ensuring that the job of teaching is a feasible one with reasonable hours and manageable levels of stress.
