Teacher Salary in Australia 2026 — Pay Scales by State

Teacher salary by state, 2026

Graduate is the step a qualified teacher starts on; top is the last step of the incremental classroom teacher scale, before roles reached by application or certification. Full-time annual salaries before tax, with superannuation paid on top. Tap a salary to see it after tax, or a state for its full pay scale.

Comparing raw numbers across states is only half the story: states step up on different dates, and some have pay changes in train that their published schedules do not yet show. Each state page says exactly what applies and when.

Full pay scale for your state

Each state page opens with its classroom teacher pay scale, then carries every other classification and step, leadership and principal rates, the agreement it comes from, and the rules for moving up a step. Pick your state.

Teacher career stages and pay

The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers describe four career stages — Graduate, Proficient, Highly Accomplished and Lead. How those map to pay differs by state:

• Graduate and Proficient teachers move up the incremental classroom scale, usually one step a year once the state’s accreditation or performance conditions are met. That scale is the graduate-to-top range in the table above.
• Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher certification carries its own salary in several states, above the top of the incremental scale. Each state page lists those rows where they are published.
• Leadership roles — head teacher, assistant principal, deputy principal and principal — sit on separate scales set by school size or complexity, also listed on each state page.

Teacher salary after tax

Every salary on this page and the state pages links to the nearest take-home pay page, which shows income tax, the Medicare levy and net pay by week, fortnight and month. Most early-career teachers also have a HECS-HELP repayment taken out — the HECS repayment calculator shows how much at your salary. Public school teachers can salary sacrifice into super; the salary sacrifice calculator shows the effect.

For how teacher pay sits against other jobs, see average salary in Australia.

What Is the Average Australian Teacher Salary?

No state publishes an average teacher salary. What is published is each state’s scale, and across the 8 states and territories on this page a qualified graduate starts on between $79,589 (VIC) and $96,180 (NT), while the top of the classroom scale runs from $118,063 (VIC) to $136,997 (NT).

The unweighted midpoint of the 8 graduate rates is $88,584, and of the 8 top-of-scale rates $126,289. These are simple averages of the published state figures, not an ABS average: they are not weighted by how many teachers each state employs or where on the scale they sit.

The closest ABS benchmark is median weekly earnings in Education and training: $1,500 a week, or $78,000 a year, in the Employee Earnings, August 2025 release (the ABS Employee Earnings and Hours, Australia, May 2025 survey gives the same industry split by hours). That figure covers every employee in the industry, from teacher aides to university staff, not classroom teachers only.

After tax, the graduate midpoint of $88,584 leaves $69,717 a year and the top-of-scale midpoint of $126,289 leaves $95,356, on the 2026-27 resident rates with the Medicare levy and no HECS repayment; the tax on every salary tables give the figure at each step of a scale.

The range is wide because each state bargains its own agreement and steps up on its own dates. For the all-occupations figure see average salary in Australia.

Teacher salary questions