Countries in Europe With Highest Salaries For Teachers.
The EU Commission’s Eurydice network has revealed that teachers’ salaries across Europe can vary between €4,000 and €92,000 per year, indicating that some countries pay teachers more than others. However, the level of education that an education worker teaches, is also a factor that determines teachers’ salaries in the region.
In general, countries that pay low-level teachers the most are Switzerland and Denmark, with the annual salary going up to €66,972 and €47,980. This means that an entry level teacher in these two countries makes around €5,581 and €3,998 monthly, respectively.
While there was no data available for countries like Ireland, Austria, Germany, Croatia and Estonia, the list of top five countries that pay entry-level teachers the most, is further concluded with Iceland (€45,648), Norway (€40,479) and the Netherlands (€38,413).
On the other end of the scale, countries that have the lowest salaries for teachers in Europe are Bulgaria (€7,731) and Romania (€8,027), indicating that workers in this sector get paid around €644 and €668 on a monthly basis, respectively.
As mentioned above, teachers’ salaries highly depend on the experience that they have, thus, teachers with more than ten years of experience, have higher salaries than those on an entry-level job.
A Flourish chartThis is not the case for many countries such as Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Spain, France, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia, as entry-level teachers as well as those that have up to ten years of experience get paid the same.
However, countries that pay teachers with more than years of experience the most, include Switzerland, Ireland and Denmark. More specifically, teachers in this category earn €72,366 annually in Switzerland, around €60,369 in Ireland and €55,312 in Denmark.
Bulgaria, on the other hand, pays these teachers the least, same as Romania and Hungary, with the annual salary peaking at €7,731, €8,818 and €8,063, respectively. On top of that, annual salary for teachers in this category – and other categories for that matter, remains unchanged in these three countries, showing that regardless of the years of experience in the field, the compensation for teachers’ experience in these countries leaves much to be desired.
School heads are often paid on a different salary scale from teachers, and their salaries tend to increase with the size of the school. In most education systems, there are significant salary differences among school heads, depending on the size or other characteristics of the school and on other factors, such as the head’s experience and responsibilities.
The same report shows that despite Switzerland and Ireland being the countries that pay the most teachers with up to 15 years of experience – around €80,547 and €62,573, Germany falls right behind with an annual salary for this category of teachers that goes up to €60,163. Denmark and Iceland also pay up to €55,593 and €45,648 per year, while Latvia and Slovakia have the lowest rates, around €9,480 and €10,980, respectively – excluding Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, which remain on the bottom of the list.
As per top range teachers, after Switzerland (€90,705), Germany pays them the most (€62,926) and Ireland (€62,573). Except for the Eastern European countries, Greece, Czechia and Croatia have some of the lowest salaries for this category – between €13,104 and €14,789.
