As the work of educational administration grows more complex, school and district leaders believe they are underpaid, a new survey finds.
Superintendents and principals say it would take a 20% raise for their paychecks to be adequate, finds a new survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center on behalf of Allovue, a K-12 education finance company.
That’s a little smaller than the size of the raise teachers said would be fair for them—in the same survey, they asked for about a 25% increase—but teachers tend to make significantly less than administrators.
That finding comes during a turbulent time when some politicians have resurfaced the longstanding complaint of “administrative bloat” in districts, saying the salaries of leaders and central office staff should be redirected to classroom instruction. Meanwhile, administrators must weigh complicated questions about growing student needs, shifts in enrollment, and competing budget priorities.
“I’m always struck by how reasonable I think these numbers are,” said Jess Gartner, Allovue’s founder. Administrators “are not asking to double or triple their salaries; they are asking for fairly modest increases at a time when they are being saddled with more responsibilities.”
The survey, conducted from February to April, asked respondents—including 507 district leaders and 447 school leaders—what they would consider a fair salary for the work they do.
The median response among superintendents was $150,000—20% higher than the actual median salary of $125,000. Principals’ median desired salary was $120,000, compared to an actual median salary of $100,000. Assistant principals’ median response was $112,500, compared to a median actual salary of $93,000.
The survey was administered as districts grappled with the end of federal COVID-19 aid and the Trump administration’s abrupt decisions to cut grants and contracts for teacher training, educational research, and school meals.
Fifty-five percent of all survey respondents, who also included 710 teachers, said their district is worse off financially than it was three years ago. That’s up from 39% of respondents to the survey last year.
“We are receiving less funding, but our student need continues to grow higher,” a North Carolina elementary school principal wrote in an open-ended survey response.
Leaders counter concerns of ‘administrative bloat’
Claims of overstaffing in districts’ central offices flatten complicated questions about education spending into simple narratives, Gartner said. That may be politically useful, but it doesn’t help solve very real questions about how to meet students’ needs and properly compensate staff, she added.
(Gartner serves on the board of trustees for Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Education Week. The Education Week newsroom, which did not participate in the survey project, independently reported its results.)
Still, the narrative has popped up in a variety of policy discussions.
When Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters demanded districts fully cover the cost of school meals this month, he did not offer any additional funding, saying they could cover the costs by redirecting money from administrators’ paychecks. Superintendents quickly refuted that claim.
In North Carolina, lawmakers debated a bill this year that would require districts to publish the job titles and salaries of all district administrators to allow for greater public accountability. That bill remains in committee.
A 2024 New Hampshire law, which takes effect in 2026, requires districts to publish charts showing average teacher salaries, average administrator salaries, and per-pupil costs over the previous 10 years and to list the salaries of the four highest-paid administrators.
“Our district spends too much of the budget on salaries and positions at the district office,” a California high school teacher wrote in an open-ended response to the EdWeek Research Center survey. “There always seems to be money for more administrative assistance, but not teacher salaries.”
While districts have added administrative staff in recent decades, the cost they spend in the central office has remained relatively steady at around 6.6 percent of public K-12 funding, federal data show.
If the average district redirected all of its administrative costs to teachers’ paychecks, it wouldn’t lead to significant increases, Gartner said.
“It creates a very difficult dynamic when you have the legislators, who are often holding the purse strings, perpetuating this narrative,” she said.
To meaningfully increase teacher salaries, lawmakers should consider increasing revenue to schools, improving health care policy, and reforming teacher-pension programs to reduce their burden on districts, Gartner said.
When the survey also asked teachers what they would consider a fair salary, the median response was $85,000—about 25% higher than the actual median salary of $68,000. Teacher respondents were also more likely than school and district leaders to underestimate the cost of benefits like health care, pensions, and time off relative to their salaries, the survey found.