Upper secondary teachers across OECD nations earn starting salaries ranging from below $30,000 to nearly $100,000. These seven countries sit at the top of that range.
All salary figures are drawn from OECD’s Education at a Glance 2025 report, which aggregates statutory salary data across member nations and converts figures to US dollars using purchasing power parity. That methodology smooths out some of the noise in currency conversion, but cost of living varies significantly across these countries. A $99,000 salary in Luxembourg buys something different from the same number on paper in rural Canada. The data represents public school teachers at upper secondary level.
1. Luxembourg
According to data from OECD’s Education at a Glance 2025, Luxembourg paid teachers the most by far, with starting salaries of $99,621. After 15 years, teachers earned an average of $137,418 per year, and the highest-earning teachers made $173,165 per year.
Luxembourg is a small, extraordinarily wealthy country where the overall cost of living is high and the public sector is generously funded. But teacher pay here reflects a deliberate policy of treating classroom professionals the way other countries treat their surgeons or senior lawyers. The career progression built into the pay scale reinforces this. A bachelor’s degree holder starts at around €67,000 per year, with salary increases expected at the 10- and 15-year marks, and a peak of around €119,000 after 30 years of service.
Luxembourg’s schools draw from across Europe, partly because the pay is competitive with any professional career a young graduate might otherwise pursue.
2. Germany
Germany and Switzerland both paid their highest-earning teachers over $100,000. The German system has a structure worth understanding: teacher salaries are set at the state (Länder) level, so what a teacher earns in Bavaria can differ meaningfully from what a colleague earns in Berlin. In high-cost states with strong public finances, top-scale secondary school teachers routinely earn salaries that put them in the upper-middle professional bracket.
Germany also offers civil servant status for most public school teachers. A tenured German teacher, called a Beamter, receives a pension and benefits package that makes the effective lifetime compensation substantially higher than the headline salary suggests. There’s no private pension scramble, no worrying about healthcare costs eroding take-home pay.
The result is that teaching in Germany carries genuine social prestige. Competition for education degrees at German universities is real.
3. Switzerland
Switzerland is an outlier in almost every compensation discussion, and teaching is no exception. Starting salaries for upper secondary teachers vary considerably across cantons, with figures ranging from roughly CHF 95,000 in lower-paying regions to over CHF 110,000 in cantons such as Zurich. Like Germany, Switzerland operates a federal system where cantons set their own salary scales, but the floor across cantons is high enough that even the lowest-paying Swiss regions land well above the OECD average.
Switzerland is also home to some of the highest private-sector wages in the world, in finance, pharmaceuticals, technology, and engineering. For a university graduate to choose teaching rather than any of those fields, the salary has to at least be in the conversation. And it is. Swiss teachers with master’s degrees, which most hold since qualifications determine pay scales, are not walking away from banker-level earnings, but they’re not accepting poverty wages either.
The Swiss model benefits from the country’s broader culture around vocational and professional education. Teaching is understood as a specialism requiring specific expertise, not just enthusiasm.
4. South Korea
South Korea’s presence on this list requires a slightly different explanation from the European entries. South Korea is renowned for its high academic standards, and the country’s investment in teacher compensation reflects the deep value placed on educators in its culture. The numbers are lower in absolute terms than Luxembourg or Switzerland, but the social context matters enormously.
In South Korea, securing a position as a public school teacher is competitive in a way that would feel unfamiliar to most Western observers. The national teacher employment exam (imyong goshi) is highly selective, with acceptance rates that vary by subject but often fall below 10 percent. Because teaching positions are scarce and desirable, they attract high-caliber candidates, and because high-caliber candidates pursue teaching, the system then invests in paying them accordingly.
South Korean teachers also benefit from a career structure that rewards tenure, with salary increments built around years of service. Combined with the cultural status attached to the profession, teachers in South Korea carry a level of social respect that their counterparts in many Western countries would find startling. The salary itself is competitive with other graduate-level professions within the Korean economy.
5. Canada
While starting pay in Canada is moderate at roughly $50,000, long-term earnings rise significantly. A data analysis from Visual Capitalist shows one of the largest salary growth arcs in the dataset. Salaries climb from that starting point to over $87,000.
Canada’s teaching salaries are set provincially, so the range across the country is real. Teachers in Ontario and Alberta typically sit at the higher end of the scale, while rural provinces offer less. But even at the lower end, Canadian teacher salaries compare favorably to most graduate professions in the same regions.
What Canada does particularly well is the career progression arc. A teacher who commits to the profession for fifteen or twenty years isn’t stuck at an entry-level rate. The pay scale rewards longevity in a way that keeps experienced teachers in classrooms rather than pushing them into administration just to earn more. Systems that only pay well at the top force their best classroom teachers to become principals as the only path to a livable salary. Canada’s structure largely avoids that trap. Strong teachers’ unions in most provinces have historically negotiated salary floors that keep the profession competitive with other fields requiring similar levels of education.
6. The Netherlands
The Netherlands offers a pay structure in which salaries at the top of the scale reach roughly double the starting salary, giving teachers a meaningful financial incentive to remain in the profession over the long term.
Dutch secondary school teachers are required to hold university-level qualifications, and the pay reflects that expectation. The profession also carries decent job security within the Dutch public sector, with contracts that don’t leave teachers cycling between short-term positions. That stability has a value that doesn’t appear in raw salary numbers but makes a real difference to whether teaching feels like a sustainable career or an endurance test.
The Netherlands has faced some pressure on teacher salaries in recent years, with shortages in urban areas pushing the issue into public debate. That the shortage exists partly because alternatives are attractive is itself a signal: Dutch teachers operate in a labor market where other graduate-level professions pay reasonably well, so the education system has to stay competitive to attract and keep good people. The salary progression structure is largely how it does that.
7. Denmark
Denmark rounds out the leading group, consistently ranked among the top-paying countries for teachers globally. Danish teachers sit within a broader social contract that makes direct salary comparisons a little tricky. Denmark has one of the most compressed wage structures in the world, the gap between the highest and lowest earners is narrower than in most other countries, which means teacher salaries land solidly in the professional middle class without the dramatic peaks seen in Luxembourg.
On average across OECD countries, the salaries of teachers with 15 years of experience range from around $55,725 at pre-primary level to $63,925 at upper secondary level, and Denmark sits notably above that average, particularly for secondary school teachers. The country’s investment in its welfare state extends to the people running its classrooms.
Denmark also funds education generously at the national level, which means teacher salaries aren’t subject to the postcode lottery that affects pay in more decentralized systems. Whether you teach in Copenhagen or a small town on the Jutland peninsula, the pay scale follows you. For a profession that already deals with enough variation in class sizes, student needs, and working conditions, having one fewer source of inequality in the system is worth something.
What This Actually Means
The countries on this list didn’t arrive at high teacher salaries by accident. Every one of them made a political choice, at some point, to treat teaching as a profession worth competing for rather than a vocation people do despite the pay. The results are lower attrition, stronger candidate pools, better-resourced classrooms.
In the United States, salary data for primary teachers shows pay running 37% lower than for tertiary-educated, full-time, full-year workers, compared to an average of 17% lower across the OECD. That 37% figure is the gap between a profession that attracts driven, talented graduates and one that filters for people who couldn’t find something better.
When the salary for a certified teacher is competitive with what an engineer or a mid-level manager earns, more people want to become teachers, more people stay in the classroom long enough to get good at it, and the students in those classrooms get a better education. Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, South Korea, Canada, the Netherlands, and Denmark have all figured this out, each in their own way. The question isn’t whether countries can afford to pay teachers well. It’s whether they’ve decided to.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.