In 2025, public schoolteachers in Wyoming earned 13% less than other workers with college degrees, according to a new report but the “pay penalty” was the third lowest among all 50 states.

Colorado posted the nation’s top penalty, where teachers earned 60 cents on the dollar.

Sylvia Allegretto, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the report's author, said as teacher pay falls further and further behind, many college graduates are considering other options.

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"Other careers that they could choose and I think it has a lot of issues for teacher retention and recruitment. It's not a new problem. It just keeps getting worse," Allegretto reported.

The average starting salary for teachers in Wyoming is just under $52,000 a year, considerably less than the $96,000 a Wyoming worker with two kids needs to earn a living wage.

The average teacher pay penalty nationwide was 25%, more than six times higher than it was in 1996. Over the past three decades, weekly wages for other college graduates rose by 30% but teachers’ wages fell by more than 6% when adjusted for inflation.

The report found women hold 70% of all teaching jobs, a trend dating back to a time when women were barred from entering other occupations. Allegretto noted it is not the case today.

"Women have a lot more choices in what they do for a career and so you have to be thinking, 'are we really getting the best and the brightest with these ever-increasing pay gaps to become public schoolteachers today?'" Allegretto asked.

The pay penalty is higher for men, which tracks with the nation’s persistent gender pay gap, where women earn just 81 cents for every dollar a man makes. The overall share of male teachers has remained static for decades and Allegretto pointed out it is unlikely to change if men can only make two-thirds of what other college graduates are getting.

"This, by the way, is at a time when everybody is talking about the need to have more male teachers because of the issues that boys are having, and the research is showing that it matters who's at the front of the classroom," Allegretto underscored.