What districts can offer teachers
Since Senate Bill 727 set a $40,000 statutory minimum, starting pay is now nearly uniform across Missouri — so the career ceiling, not the first-year offer, is where districts really differ. These four maps trace pay across a teaching career, and the state grant that props up the floor. Salaries come from the MNEA 2025-26 salary survey.
What this page shows
- MNEA’s statewide summary reports that 274 of 518 districts — more than half the state — rely on the Teacher Baseline Salary Grant to reach Missouri’s $40,000 starting-salary floor. The matched salary-schedule file used for the map identifies 272 grant users among 510 district records. The grant is an annual appropriation, not a guarantee.
- Reliance on it maps who has nothing to tax: 67% of rural districts use the grant, against 2% of suburbs and none of the districts above 10,000 students.
- The floor has been leveled; the ceiling has not. Starting pay is now near-identical statewide, but the gap between districts widens with every year of experience.
- These are nominal employer salary schedules, not cost-of-living-adjusted paychecks. A district’s location is not a teacher’s home address; educators may commute across rural, town, city and suburban lines.
The highest salary each district publishes
With the starting floor set by law, the top of the schedule is where districts compete. The suburban rings of Kansas City and St. Louis stand out darkly against a lighter rural interior.
View the numbers as a table
| Community type | Districts | Median average salary (2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Rural | 388 | $46,655 |
| Town | 69 | $54,411 |
| Suburb | 45 | $67,644 |
| City | 14 | $60,638 |
| All districts | 516 | $48,603 |
Comparable wages differ before a district writes its salary schedule
NCES’s experimental Comparable Wage Index for Teachers (CWIFT) estimates what comparable college-educated workers outside K–12 teaching earn in each district’s labor market. A value of 1.000 equals the national average; it is a market context measure, not a teacher salary or a cost-of-living adjustment.
View the comparison by community type
| Community type | Districts | Median index |
|---|---|---|
| Rural | 388 | 0.780 |
| Town | 69 | 0.792 |
| City | 14 | 0.860 |
| Suburb | 45 | 0.940 |
| All mapped districts | 516 | 0.789 |
Find the value for any district under the Teachers tab in Find Your District. Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates, ACS-Comparable Wage Index for Teachers, 2022.
Master’s + 10 years — the SB 727 threshold
Master’s + 10 years is the mid-career mark SB 727 also raised, to $46,000. On this map, red marks districts paying below the statewide median at that step.
Top of the Master’s lane
The top of the Master’s lane is what a 20-plus-year career teacher can ultimately earn — the practical ceiling for most Missouri educators. Red again marks districts below the statewide median.
That is a $29,000 spread at the top of the Master’s lane — the same job, the same degree — nearly the whole salary of a starting teacher, compounding across twenty years.
And it shapes who can afford to stay: the districts with the lowest ceilings are the same rural and small-town districts that struggle hardest to hold their experienced teachers.
Who needs state money to pay the state minimum
Because many districts can’t fund the new floor from local revenue, the state pays the difference through the Teacher Baseline Salary Grant — but it must be re-appropriated every year. Blue districts use the grant; yellow qualified but did not apply.
Teacher pay has fallen since 1991 — almost everywhere
Every map above shows pay in today’s dollars. This one asks a harder question: after accounting for inflation, is a Missouri teacher better off than a Missouri teacher was in 1991? For most of the state, the answer is no. Red districts pay their teachers less, in real purchasing power, than the same district paid in 1991.
This is the context in which SB 727’s $40,000 floor should be read. The floor lifted the bottom of the profession. It did not reverse thirty-four years of erosion in what the job pays.
The floor is level. The ceiling isn’t.
Every map on this page describes the same asymmetry: Missouri set one statutory floor for every teacher’s first paycheck, but never touched what a career could be worth by its end. What that asymmetry means depends on where you sit.
Starting pay is no longer where districts differ — 64% of Missouri districts (331 of 518) now start every new teacher at exactly $40,000, the state’s statutory floor. If you are comparing two districts on “competitive pay,” the real difference shows up twenty years in, not on day one: the career ceiling ranges from about $36,000 to $128,071 for the identical job.
That roughly $92,000 spread compounds over a career. A teacher who starts in a low-ceiling district and never moves is not paid less because they are less experienced or less qualified than a teacher across the state — they are paid less because of where the building sits.
The top of the Master’s lane is the number worth bringing to a retention conversation, not the entry step. Statewide it is about $58,200, but the median suburban schedule tops out at $85,100 against $56,000 in the median rural district — a $29,000 gap at the exact career stage when a district most needs to keep someone.
If your district relies on the Baseline Salary Grant to hit $40,000 — as MNEA’s statewide summary says 274 of 518 districts do — remember it is reappropriated every year, not guaranteed. The matched map identifies 272 grant users among 510 salary-schedule records; thirteen matched districts qualified but did not apply and still start below the floor.
SB 727’s $40,000 floor did exactly what a floor does: it leveled the bottom. It did not touch the ceiling, and the ceiling is where the real disparity in this profession now lives — a roughly $92,000 range between one district’s highest possible salary and another’s.
The longer view is the harder number: 419 of the 516 mapped districts — 81% — pay teachers less in real, inflation-adjusted terms than they did in 1991. The median district is down about 7.5%. A statutory floor raised the bottom of a profession that has otherwise been losing ground for over three decades.
It is tempting to read “my district needs a state grant to hit $40,000” as a sign of local stinginess. The map says otherwise: 67% of rural districts use the Baseline Salary Grant, against 2% of suburbs and none of the state’s largest districts — that tracks what a district has to tax, not what it is willing to.
And the decline in real teacher pay since 1991 is not a rural story specifically — it is actually steepest in cities (−15.6%) and suburbs (−10.9%), ahead of towns (−8.3%) and rural districts (−6.8%). Wherever you live, the teacher in your local school very likely earns less today, in real terms, than the same job paid in 1991.
- Where does our district’s schedule maximum sit against the statewide median of about $62,000? Twenty years from now, that number — not the $40,000 starting offer — is what determines whether a career teacher stays.
- Do we rely on the Baseline Salary Grant to reach $40,000? If so, what happens to our starting pay in a year the legislature funds it differently?
- How does our real, inflation-adjusted teacher pay compare to 1991? Statewide, 81% of districts have lost ground — is ours one of the 97 that hasn’t?
- What is the gap between our entry step and our schedule maximum — and does it grow early enough to keep a teacher through their first five years?
- If our ceiling sits well below the $58,200 statewide median, what are we offering instead? (Check the Teachers page for advanced-degree share and experience — a lower ceiling usually shows up there too.)