Teacher Salary in Virginia 2026,
$65,550 Median | BLS Data by City

Virginia teachers earn a median $65,550 a year per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $60,120 and $82,350 and a full range of $49,770 to $100,290. That is 2.5% above the $63,970 national median, though the statewide figure hides an enormous division-to-division spread.

Among Virginia-only metros, Harrisonburg at $77,340 leads by a wide margin, then Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk at $63,380, Roanoke at $62,010, Richmond at $61,290 and Winchester at $61,200. The state's genuinely highest-paying divisions are in Northern Virginia, which BLS counts inside the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria multi-state metro rather than as a Virginia area.

No. Virginia's General Assembly funds a share of instructional salaries through the Standards of Quality, but each local school division adopts its own salary scale and its own local supplement. That is why the Virginia band runs from $49,770 to $100,290: two teachers with identical licences and identical experience can be tens of thousands of dollars apart depending on which division hired them.

Through the Virginia Department of Education's Division of Teacher Education and Licensure. A provisional licence is the time-limited entry route while outstanding requirements are completed; the collegiate professional and postgraduate professional licences are the renewable credentials divisions build their salary scales around. Endorsements in special education, mathematics, science and world languages are in shortage across most Virginia divisions.

Virginia's income tax reaches its top rate of 5.75% at just seventeen thousand dollars of taxable income, so a teacher earning the $65,550 median is effectively paying a flat 5.75%, and no Virginia locality adds an income tax. Localities do levy a tangible personal property tax on vehicles that varies by county and city, and the real cost difference between divisions is housing rather than tax.

Because the state delegates the salary decision. Virginia funds a share of instructional positions through the Standards of Quality and leaves the actual scale, including any local supplement, to each division's school board and the locality that funds it. Wealthy Northern Virginia jurisdictions with large commercial tax bases can pay far above the state-funded share; rural divisions with thin local revenue cannot. The result is a distribution from $49,770 to $100,290 in which geography and local tax capacity, not classroom skill, explain most of the variance.

It describes elementary school teachers on a payroll basis and it annualises a contract that is typically ten months long. Virginia teachers who take summer school, coaching stipends, department chair supplements or extended contracts earn above the figure attached to their step; those who do not, do not. The published band also excludes the substantial share of Virginia teaching done by long-term substitutes and provisionally licensed staff in hard-to-staff divisions, whose pay sits at the bottom of the distribution.

Moving divisions. It is the bluntest fact about this occupation in Virginia and the one most worth saying: transferring from a low-supplement division to a high-supplement one with the same licence and the same experience can be worth more than a decade of step increases. After that, a master's degree, National Board certification and shortage-area endorsements each carry supplements on most Virginia scales, and administrative and instructional coaching roles are what reach the $82,350 seventy-fifth percentile and the $100,290 ninetieth.