Mississippi teacher salary schedule 2026-27: the pay scale, the 2026 raise and special education pay

1. The 2026-27 Mississippi teacher pay scale, step by step

Mississippi’s minimum teacher salary scale is set by state law, Miss. Code § 37-19-7. Senate Bill 2103 of the 2026 Regular Session put in a new table, headed “2026-2027 AND SUBSEQUENT SCHOOL YEARS MINIMUM SALARY SCHEDULE”. The law then says that all teachers employed on a full-time basis shall be paid a “minimum salary in accordance with the above scale.” MDE publishes the same amounts as its FY2026-2027 MSFF Salary Schedule. We checked all 144 amounts in the law against MDE’s schedule, and they match.

The license classes. Each column is a license class. MDE’s licensure guidelines set the class by degree: “Class A = Bachelor’s level license”, “Class AA = Master’s degree level license”, “Class AAA = Specialist degree level license” and “Class AAAA = Doctorate degree level license”. They add: “Juris Doctorate and Master of Fine Arts Degrees are Issued at the Class AAA Level”. The law fixes each teacher’s class for the year by the license held on October 1 (section 3).

Each row is a step: a number of years of teaching experience, from 0 to 35 and above. The amounts are yearly, for a full-time teacher.

On a phone, slide the table sideways to see all four license classes.

Within each column, most steps add the same amount each year: $600 for Class AAAA, $550 for AAA, $525 for AA and $400 for A, with larger steps at 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 years (our reading of the table).

2. What changed for 2026-27: a $2,000 raise to every step of the scale

Senate Bill 2103 was approved by the Governor on April 8, 2026 (bill history), and its salary section took effect on July 1, 2026. We compared MDE’s 2025-26 schedule with the 2026-27 one: every one of the 144 amounts (36 steps in 4 license classes) is $2,000 higher. The table shows the Class A column at every fifth step; the change column is our arithmetic.

Before 2026, the scale had not changed since the START Act of 2022 (House Bill 530), which set it from the 2022-23 school year. MDE’s 2022-23 schedule and its 2025-26 schedule match in every amount (our comparison).

The law raised the minimum scale. What a teacher is paid above it depends on the district (section 3).

3. A minimum salary, not a cap: local supplements

The scale is a floor for full-time teachers. Districts may pay more, through a local supplement on top of the state scale. The same section of the law sets these conditions. In our words:

• Cutting a teacher’s local supplement costs the district: a district receives no funds under the section for any school year in which it reduces the local supplement paid to an individual teacher below what it paid that teacher, for the same duties, in the year before.
• The license class is fixed each October: the class used for a teacher’s salary each year is set by the type of valid teacher’s license issued to the teacher on or before October 1 of that school year.
• Retirees from another state’s system: districts may, at their discretion, negotiate the salary of licensed employees who receive retirement benefits from another state’s retirement system.

The Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi (PERS) has its own rules for retirees who go back to work; our PERS return-to-work guide explains them.

4. Special education teacher pay: a new $2,000 state supplement

The salary scale has no separate column for special education. Senate Bill 2103 added a state supplement instead, in a new paragraph of the same law, § 37-19-7(2)(b), in effect from July 1, 2026. In our words, it gives an annual salary supplement of $2,000, plus fringe benefits, on top of any other pay, to any licensed special education teacher employed by a school district on a full-time basis and “specifically providing special education instruction” to the exceptional students entitled to that instruction under Chapter 23, Title 37 of the Mississippi Code, and in compliance with IDEA. The same paragraph also covers certain occupational therapists and school psychologists.

In our words, the law also says MDE pays these supplements directly to the local school district, in addition to its funding formula allotments and in accordance with regulations of the State Board of Education, and that districts may not reduce the local supplement of an employee who receives one. When we checked on Oct. 14, 2026, we found no State Board regulation on this supplement and no MDE guidance on how districts claim it.

The Legislature funded it for 2026-27. House Bill 1935, MDE’s appropriation for the fiscal year that began July 1, 2026, provides $14,608,209 in its Section 48 for the $2,000 annual salary supplement for each licensed special education teacher employed by a school district on a full-time basis and specifically providing special education instruction (our summary of Section 48).

5. Average teacher salary in Mississippi (MDE)

MDE’s 2024-25 Superintendent’s Annual Report lists, on its Facts & Figures page, an “AVERAGE TEACHER SALARY” of $54,975 and 32,540 classroom teachers (report PDF). That page does not define the figure. It is an average, not the state minimum. We found no 2025-26 average on MDE’s site when we checked on Oct. 14, 2026.

MDE also publishes each district’s 2024-25 average classroom teacher salary in a workbook. It has no statewide total; use the report’s figure above for the state as a whole.

6. What BLS reports for Mississippi special education teachers (May 2025)

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates pay by occupation in its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS). Its May 2025 estimates for Mississippi:

BLS publishes only annual wages for these teacher occupations. Its job counts leave out the self-employed and are rounded to the nearest 10. These estimates are separate from MDE’s average in section 5: BLS’s rows are special education teachers only, at public and private employers alike, while MDE’s figure is an average teacher salary, not one for special education teachers.