Administrator Salaries: A Bird’s-Eye View
By Theresa Kelly Gegen
Welcome to the annual Administrator Salary Series, presented each year at about this time by the Illinois School Board Journal. This study takes a big-picture, bird’s-eye view, comparing full-time equivalent salaries plus monetary benefits for district superintendent salaries, assistant/associate superintendent salaries, principal and assistant principal salaries, and a catch-all category of other administrators.
The data we use, The Educator Employment Information Public Data Sets, are publicly available. Salaries are as reported by the school districts to the Illinois State Board of Education, as required by the Illinois School Code (105 ILCS 5/10-20.47 and 5/34-18.38). The nomenclatures, including position descriptions and titles, are established by ISBE. We once again thank ISBE for ongoing efforts to make this information available, and to the districts for providing the data.
In each job title category, we compare 2023 to 2024, and also make regional comparisons. Like last year, we also dove a little deeper into the determinative Northeast Region. Typically, the regional breakdowns prove most useful to boards of education determining salary ranges for their administrators. Excepting the Northeast, each region includes one or more population centers, a mix of rural, suburban, and urban districts, and at least one state college or university, making comparisons reasonable and straightforward.
We also heard from readers interested in different ways of disaggregating the data. We took their advice and this installation in the series includes superintendent salaries by type of district and by enrollments.
For the purposes of this study, we remove salary data for Chicago Public Schools, for many reasons. With 320,000 students in 623 schools, it is by far the largest school district in the state and is among the top five in the nation. We also do not use data from Illinois Department of Justice programs and independent charter schools. If a charter school is operated by a local public school district, its data is included.
These are full-time equivalent salaries plus monetary benefits, as reported by the districts.
Over time, especially in smaller subsets, we see the lows, highs, and sometimes even averages fluctuate and go against trends. This is possibly due to missing data, oddities in data entry, pandemics, or specific circumstances such as partial-years of service or less than full-time equivalents. As time goes on, we see fewer of these oddities. This makes for more consistent comparisons over time, but also slightly less interesting reading.
District Superintendents
Salaries for Illinois district superintendents have risen at a steady pace in the three years covered here. In fact, over the past 10 years, the change in average salary for superintendents has ranged from 2.3 to 2.9%, excepting the coronavirus year, when average salary still increased, but grew by less, at 1.8%. From 2023 to 2024, average district superintendent salaries increased by 2.9% and stand at $211,132 (see Table 1).
As we note over the course of the series, regional differences still provide the most significant numbers in comparing superintendent salaries (see Table 2). The Northeast division covers Cook, Lake, DuPage, McHenry, Kane, Kendall, Grundy, Will, and Kankakee counties. The Northeast has the single highest salary in the state, and also the highest low. The Northeast has an average district superintendent salary of $273,540. Not only is that the highest average salary per region, it is by a wide margin: The Northwest, at $188,450, is the next highest.
The highest high salary is in the Northeast at $537,197 and the lowest low salary is in the Southeast at $30,000. Ranking the six regions from highest to lowest average district superintendent salary gives us Northeast ($273,540), Northwest ($188,450); East Central ($178,363); West Central ($176,970); Southwest ($168,107); and Southeast ($154,931).
Our regional analysis allows us to look at that data from different angles. For example, the top 40 district superintendent salaries are all in the Northeast. The average district superintendent salary in the Northeast is, again, $273,540, and that is almost exactly $100,000 more than the average for the other five regions combined.
Breaking the Northeast into regional subsets, we see further evidence of the regional impact (see Table 2A). According to the data, the average district superintendent salary in Lake and DuPage counties is $296,341 for 90 superintendents. In Cook County, with 146 superintendents, the average is $279,344. And in the remainder of the region, which is the 89 superintendents in McHenry, Kane, Kendall, Grundy, Will, and Kankakee counties, the average is $240,961.
This year, we took the additional steps of comparing district superintendent salary data by school district enrollment and school district type.
Counting the whole state, sorting by district type (Unit, High School, and Elementary) establishes that the average salary for district superintendent is highest for the state’s 96 High School districts, at $261,002, followed by 370 Elementary districts averaging $218,831 and the 404 Unit districts at $192,230 (see Table 2B).
For district enrollment, we broke districts into five reasonably balanced categories, with the aim of using the number that LUDA, the Large Unit District Association, uses. LUDA defines “large” as enrollments of at least 3,500 students. The single highest and single lowest salaries are in elementary districts.
The data establishes what you might guess: Superintendents of districts with larger enrollment numbers are paid more, on average, than those in smaller districts (see Table 2C).
Assistant and Associate Superintendents
The study also looks at other job title categories: Assistant and associate superintendents, principals and assistant principals, and other administrators.
The average salary for assistant and associate superintendents rose by 3.2% from 2023 to 2024, a percentage change larger than the previous two years (see Table 3).
These other categories further demonstrate the dominance of the Northeast when crunching these numbers (see Table 4). There are 405 associate and assistant superintendents in the Northeast region, out of 527 in the state.
The high salary, highest low salary, and average salary are all the highest in the Northeast region. The ranking, with Northeast as the highest and Southeast as the lowest, is the same here as for district superintendents.
Principals and Assistant Principals
After an unusual 9.3% increase in principal salaries from 2022 to 2023, which we noted in the previous installment of the salary study, the average salary gain for principals in Illinois leveled off to 3.4%, at $144,209 (see Table 5).
The regional rankings from high to low average salary depart a bit for principals (see Table 6). The highest two are still Northeast at $163,865 and Northwest at $138,233, but then the Southwest at $123,893 jumps up to third highest average principal salary. West Central ($122,203), East Central ($119,967) and Southeast ($110,665) follow. There are 1,603 principals in the Northeast region, more than in the rest of the state combined.
Statewide, assistant principals saw a 4.3% increase in average salary from 2023 to 2024, the highest bump among our employment categories (see Table 7). Assistant principal salaries range from $25,000 to $275,871, with an average salary of $127,193 for the 2,503 reported.
The same outsized tallies apply for assistant principals. There are 2,508 in the state, and 1,652 of them are in the Northeast region. The rankings by average follows the same order as principals: Northeast, Northwest, Southwest, West Central, East Central, and Southeast (see see Table 8).
Other Administrators
Our batch of “Other Administrators” includes Bilingual Administrator, CEO, CSBO, Dean of Students (w/Admin Endorsement), Director Area Vocational Center, General Administrator, Head of Gen Ed, and Special Education Director. Although their job descriptions are dissimilar, the salary data they provide is a good starting point when considering salaries for the many administrators who are not principals or superintendents.
Statewide, this “other” category saw a salary increase of 4.1% from 2023 to 2024 (see Table 9). And, of course, the Northeast skews our numbers — 79% of the administrators in this category are in the Northeast (see Table 10). The average salary for these administrators in 2024 ranged from $103,832 in the Southeast to $153,164 in the Northeast.
Teacher Salaries
Although it’s outside the scope of this study, here is some basic data on teacher salaries, and some info on where to find more. As noted, the data set used for this study comes from the Illinois State Board of Education. The set includes approximately 140,000 public school teachers in Illinois.
ISBE also annually conducts a separate Illinois Teacher Salary Study, and its report contains information on teacher salary policies, salaries paid, and benefits. Like the full Educator Employment Information Public Data Sets used here, the Teacher Salary Study is reported by the districts and is publicly available.
According to the National Education Association, the national average starting teacher salary is $46,526 and the national average teacher salary is $72,030. Other key takeaways from the 2025 report (2023-2024 data), from the NEA:
“Even with record-level increases in some states, average teacher pay has failed to keep up with inflation over the past decade. Adjusted for inflation, on average, teachers are making 5% less than they did 10 years ago. … Teachers earn 24% more, on average, in states with collective bargaining, and education support professionals earn 7% more.”
According to the NEA, the Illinois average starting teacher salary is $45,061, ranked 26th among the 50 states and Washington D.C. The and the national average teacher salary is $75,978, ranked 13th in the nation.
About the Series
Since 1996, the Illinois School Board Journal, collaborating with researchers in the field of educational leadership, has published a report on the salaries of superintendents and principals in Illinois. Early data for the study was collected via paper survey, with relatively low rates of return.
Illinois school districts, since 2009, have been required by law to report administrator and teacher salary information to the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). Data were briefly unavailable during the transition, and the Administrator Salaries series was paused for a few years.
With reporting standards in place and the data available to researchers, IASB’s study of administrator salaries was revived in 2014 and 2015. The series paused again in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic upended data collection and, consequently, series publishing. It also concluded the ability of the Journal’s longtime collaborators at Western Illinois University to participate. We are grateful for their work over the years to keep the series going.
Since 2022, IASB has presented the series in the Journal as analyzed by Editor Theresa Kelly Gegen and the Communications Department. We adhere to the original standards for identifying trends, reportage, and analysis as faithfully as possible. In 2024, we moved the series to the summer, a timeline that offers more relevant and current data.
Visit www.iasb.com/administrator-salaries for the most recent installments in the Administrator Salaries Series. The full series, dating back to 1996, is available by contacting IASB.
Conclusion
What the Journal presents here is an overview. It is possible for districts seeking salary comparisons to disaggregate the data further than we have room for here. Districts are encouraged to do their own analyses of the data most relevant to them, using the same publicly available data from ISBE. If you have questions about how to do that, you can reach out to IASB at communications@iasb.com. Questions about the data itself can be directed to ISBE’s Department of Data Strategies and Analytics.
