Teacher pay is unusually easy to compare. Most countries publish the full scale, progression is service-based rather than negotiated individually, and the job itself is close to identical across systems. What is not identical is what the state hands over at the end of the month.
The figures below take a mid-career secondary school teacher, roughly ten to fifteen years of service on the standard national scale, and apply the local 2026 rules for a single employee.
The ranking
Federal tax only; state and provincial tax reduce both figures, and American teacher pay varies enormously by state. † Calculated as an ordinary employee. Most German teachers are Beamte, see below. Currency conversions use approximate mid-market rates for July 2026: 1 EUR equals 0.86 GBP, 1.16 USD, 1.60 CAD, 1.77 AUD, 1.95 NZD, 0.93 CHF, 7.46 DKK, 11.0 SEK, 11.7 NOK, 176 JPY, 1.50 SGD and 3.80 ILS.
The German footnote is not a footnote
German teachers in most federal states are civil servants, Beamte, and civil servants do not pay into the statutory pension, unemployment or health schemes. They receive a state pension funded from general revenue and a subsidy towards private health insurance instead.
The practical effect is large. Removing pension, unemployment and health contributions from a 58,000 euro salary leaves income tax and long-term care only, which lifts monthly net pay by roughly 900 euros against the figure in the table. On that basis a German teacher moves up to around fifth place rather than tenth.
It also means the German teacher's take-home is not comparable with the German engineer's take-home at the same gross, a distortion that does not exist in any other country here. The standard employee position is set out in what a 70,000 euro German salary leaves.
Luxembourg pays teachers like consultants
Luxembourg's teacher scale is the highest in Europe by a wide margin and comfortably ahead of what the same country pays many private sector professionals. It reflects a deliberate policy of recruiting from a small trilingual labour pool in competition with Brussels, Frankfurt and Paris.
The deduction rate of 37.9% is heavy by Luxembourgish standards, because the salary sits well up the scale. Even so the net figure is nearly two and a half times the Italian one. The wider Luxembourg picture, including the minimum wage that anchors the bottom of the scale, is in the guide to Luxembourg wages.
Where the profession has lost ground
Three countries in the table pay teachers materially less than comparable graduate professions in the same economy.
Italy and France both sit near the bottom despite average national wages that are far from the bottom. In both, teacher pay progression is slow and heavily service-based, so the mid-career figure is much closer to the starting salary than it is in the Nordics or the Netherlands.
Japan pays teachers reasonably by domestic standards; the euro conversion is doing most of the damage. A weaker yen has cut the international value of Japanese public sector pay sharply over the past few years, an effect examined in Japanese pay and the exchange rate.
England looks respectable in the table and is propped up by a low deduction rate. Teachers in England also contribute between 7.4% and 11.7% of salary to the Teachers' Pension Scheme, which is not included above and takes roughly £250 a month off the figure at this salary. In exchange it remains one of the few open defined benefit schemes in Europe, a trade also faced by NHS staff and quantified in the NHS payslip breakdown.
What the table does not price
- Contact hours. Teaching loads vary from around 600 to over 1,000 hours a year across these systems, which changes the hourly rate more than the tax does.
- Holiday length. Generous almost everywhere, but the ratio between paid weeks and worked weeks differs by enough to matter.
- Pension. Employee-funded in the UK and Ireland, employer or state funded in Germany, Australia and the Nordics. The gross figures are not comparable without adjusting for it.
- Housing. A teacher's salary in Zurich, Dublin, Amsterdam or Sydney faces housing costs that a teacher's salary in Valencia or Naples does not.
- Progression. Some scales top out 20% above the mid-career point, others 60%. The number that matters is the one you will be on in fifteen years.
Check a specific national scale against the local rules using the Germany Teacher Salary, UK and Netherlands Teacher Salary teaching pages, or run the figure through any country calculator.