Eighteen percent of K-12 public teachers say they plan to leave at the end of this school year, roughly flat from last year and 5% less than those who planned to leave in 2022-23, according to new data from the RAND Corp.’s 2026 State of the American Teacher and American Life Panel surveys and cited in an Education Week article.
Nearly 1 in 4 teachers overall, and 30% of teachers in their first five years, said in 2026 that they planned to stay in the classroom as long as they could.
The share of teachers with stress and depression has declined since last year, even as burnout has increased, particularly for male teachers, according to the survey. A majority of teachers surveyed listed student misbehavior among the top three common causes of stress, higher than any other option. Student behavior was 20 percentage points more likely to be in teachers’ top three sources of stress than low pay, the next most common stressor.
Student behavior has been a consistently high source of teacher stress for the last five years, says Elizabeth Steiner, a RAND senior policy researcher and the lead author of the report.
Teachers report similar workloads and family responsibilities this year compared to last year, spending on average 50 hours working in school and 13 additional hours on other work for those with second jobs outside of school.
Just under 1 in 5 teachers plan to leave their jobs at the end of the 2025-26 school year, roughly on par with last school year.
The increasingly uncertain economy may also play a role in educators choosing to stay in the classroom. Teachers’ career choices are driven partly by “their feelings about whether they are likely to find another job that uses their skills, and how certain they feel about paying the bills,” says Steiner.
Teachers’ contributions to their overall household finances were studied. Teachers’ base pay and extra income account for 60% of their families’ income.
After accounting for inflation, 61% of teachers earned less in 2026 than 2025. Virtually all teachers also still pay for at least some of their classroom supplies, RAND found, averaging $665 in 2026.
“Almost every teacher reports receiving some kind of raise” in 2025-26, Steiner says, “but when you transfer these into real wages and adjust for inflation, lot of teachers actually received a wage decrease.”
Teachers are more likely than similar workers to pick up additional work outside their main teaching roles, but they earned just over $5,400 for teachers’ extra work, less than half as much as other workers make in second jobs.
Education Week
