Teachers leave the profession because of demanding workloads, stress, limited classroom support, compensation, and changes in their personal lives. Retirement, caregiving, and moves into other careers also contribute to departures. Understanding those reasons helps schools respond to working conditions while preparing for planned career transitions.
When departures leave classes without a teacher, contact Elevate K-12 to discuss LIVE virtual instruction for those courses while your district recruits.
How Many Teachers Are Leaving the Profession?
Teacher attrition means leaving teaching. Mobility means continuing to teach at another school. Both create a vacancy at the original school, and a transfer within a district can leave the district's total teaching workforce unchanged.
The Learning Policy Institute's July 2026 vacancy and certification compilation identified 37,569 unfilled teaching positions reported by 29 states and Washington, DC. The compilation uses states' latest available figures from 2023–24 through 2025–26. It separately identified 387,843 teachers who were not fully certified across all 50 states and DC; those staffed positions belong in a different category from unfilled vacancies.
A vacancy count describes positions awaiting a teacher at a particular point in time. An annual departure rate describes teachers who left during a defined period. A survey asking about plans to leave describes intentions that can change before a teacher submits a resignation or retires.
North Carolina's 2026 State of the Teaching Profession report recorded 9,107 departures from the state's public school district teaching workforce between March 2024 and March 2025, or 10.11% of 90,105 teachers. The state measure excludes moves between North Carolina districts and charter schools and describes North Carolina's district workforce. It cannot establish a national rate of leaving teaching.
What Does Teacher Attrition Mean for Schools?
When a teacher leaves, the school has to maintain instruction, recruit a replacement, and help that replacement understand the students and curriculum. The timing affects the response: an announced retirement allows preparation before the next school year, while a midyear departure requires immediate classroom coverage.
In RAND's March 2026 district turnover report, leaders estimated that an average of 6.7% of teachers resigned or retired in 2024–25, compared with 7.2% in 2023–24. The estimates came from a nationally representative fall 2025 survey of 315 district leaders. They combine resignation and retirement and reflect district reports, including departures that may lead to teaching elsewhere.
Teacher Attrition and Student Learning
Students depend on teachers who understand their progress, classroom routines, and learning needs. A replacement needs time to establish those relationships and determine what students have already learned. Clear lesson records, assessment information, and documented accommodations help preserve continuity during that transition.
An unfilled position can require rotating substitutes, reassigned staff, or changes to course availability. Each arrangement changes who prepares lessons, provides feedback, and follows up with families. Schools can protect continuity by assigning a consistent instructor and giving that instructor access to the curriculum and student support information.
School Financial Costs
Replacing a teacher requires recruitment, application review, interviews, hiring paperwork, and onboarding. Administrators and experienced teachers spend time on those tasks alongside their existing responsibilities. A vacancy may also require paid substitute coverage or additional compensation for staff who take on extra teaching.
The expense depends on how long the position remains open, the recruitment process, coverage arrangements, and the support a new hire needs. Salary for the replacement is a separate ongoing expense. Longer vacancies extend coverage costs, while a replacement with less experience may need more mentoring time.
School Culture and Stability
Departing teachers take knowledge of students, families, curriculum, and school routines with them. Remaining staff may take on mentoring, committee work, and classroom coverage while a new colleague settles in. Repeated departures can make collaboration harder when teams continually rebuild their shared practices.
A stable transition includes time for handovers and a clear division of responsibilities. New teachers need a colleague who can explain daily procedures, and established teachers need protected time for their own classes. Those arrangements help the school maintain consistent expectations for students and staff.
Main Reasons Teachers Leave the Profession
Workload, support, and compensation can influence the same teacher's decision. Retirement eligibility, health, childcare, and other family responsibilities add personal circumstances to that decision. The reasons teachers give for considering departure can differ from the reasons recorded after they actually leave.
North Carolina's recorded departures show several different routes out of the state's district teaching workforce. Of the 9,107 departures in March 2024 to March 2025, 1,356 were resignations to change careers, representing 14.89%. Full-benefit retirements accounted for 1,454 departures, or 15.97%, and reduced-benefit retirements for 550, or 6.04%. Each percentage uses the 9,107 departing teachers as its denominator. These selected administrative categories cover part of the departure total.
Teacher Workload and Stress
Teaching includes lesson preparation, assessment, family communication, meetings, and documentation alongside classroom instruction. Covering an absent colleague's class can displace the time set aside for preparation. When unfinished work regularly extends into evenings and weekends, teachers have less time for rest and family responsibilities.
RAND's June 2026 teacher survey found that 18% of teachers were somewhat or very likely to leave their current school job by the end of 2025–26. The nationally representative survey included 829 public K–12 teachers in January and February 2026; 788 answered the intention question. Leaving a particular school job can include moving to another school. The responses describe teachers' intentions; actual departures require follow-up data.
Teachers in RAND's 2026 time-use analysis reported about 50 hours per week on school-related work and about 54 hours including outside jobs. RAND excluded inconsistent school-work-hour responses, about 26% of respondents, from that analysis. The plausible school-work-hour group contained 604 teachers. These weekly averages describe work during the school year.
Managing student behavior was a top-three job stressor for 52% of teachers in the RAND survey. Low salary followed at 33%, with hours outside the contract and administrative work outside teaching each at 32%. These responses describe sources of stress among teachers still working; they do not measure why former teachers left.
Student behavior also affects workload. Teachers need time to teach, respond to disruptions, document incidents, and coordinate support for students. Reliable assistance with those responsibilities can make daily work more manageable.
Teacher Support and Resources
Support includes a principal who responds to classroom problems, usable instructional materials, and access to colleagues with relevant expertise. A teacher managing a difficult class needs a clear response to behavior incidents and time to coordinate with student support staff. Unclear responsibilities can leave the teacher handling those tasks alone.
Resources affect preparation as well as teaching. A coherent curriculum and accessible lesson materials reduce the need to create everything from scratch. Functional technology, timely specialist support, and consistent school procedures help teachers spend their available time on instruction.
Teacher Compensation and Benefits
Teachers weigh salary alongside health insurance, retirement eligibility, family needs, and the time their jobs require. Higher pay elsewhere can make a career change financially possible. A move to another teaching position may also offer a higher salary or a more suitable schedule.
In the same 2026 RAND study, teachers reported average annual base pay of $75,599, compared with slightly more than $105,000 among other working college graduates. The comparison group comprised 498 adults ages 18 to 65 with at least a bachelor's degree who worked at least 35 hours per week and were not K–12 teachers. These are self-reported base-pay averages for groups with different work calendars and job characteristics. The comparison does not adjust for those differences or include the value of benefits.
Retirement benefits have a different role for teachers approaching eligibility. A planned retirement reflects a career transition, while a resignation may reflect another job, a family need, or dissatisfaction with working conditions. Keeping those categories separate helps schools understand which departures a change in employment conditions could address.
How Schools Can Help Teachers Stay
Schools can respond to the conditions teachers describe through manageable assignments, dependable classroom support, and relevant professional learning. Compensation decisions also need to reflect the demands of the role and local employment options. Individual teachers' health, family needs, and retirement plans continue to shape their choices.
Improve Teachers' Work-Life Balance
Protecting preparation time gives teachers space to finish work during the school day. Leaders can review which meetings require everyone, combine repeated documentation requests, and arrange coverage without routinely taking a teacher's planning period.
- Set clear priorities when teaching, assessment, and administrative deadlines compete.
- Schedule collaboration within paid working time wherever possible.
- Set expectations for routine family communication outside school hours.
- Provide predictable procedures for leave and short-term classroom coverage.
Enhance Support and Teacher Resources
Teachers need a dependable response when a classroom problem exceeds what they can resolve during a lesson. Leaders can identify who responds to urgent behavior concerns, how specialist support reaches the classroom, and which staff member follows up with families.
A shared set of curriculum materials, clear access to supplies, and practical technology support reduce avoidable preparation work. New teachers also benefit from a named mentor with time allocated for observation, discussion, and help with school procedures. Mentoring assignments need manageable workloads for the experienced teachers providing that support.
Offer Teachers Professional Development Opportunities
Professional development is more useful when it addresses the classes teachers actually teach. Coaching can focus on a current instructional challenge, followed by time to practice, discuss student work, and adapt the approach. Teachers' input helps leaders select training that fits their subjects and students.
Professional growth can also include peer observation, curriculum leadership, or mentoring with appropriate time and compensation. These opportunities recognize teachers' expertise and give them a role in school decisions. Scheduling professional learning within existing working time keeps it from becoming another evening obligation.
Support Teacher Retention With Elevate K-12
Elevate K-12 provides LIVE virtual teaching for schools with instructional staffing needs. A school considering virtual instruction needs to define the courses, schedule, student support, and on-site responsibilities involved. That planning helps establish how a virtual teacher would fit into the school's existing program.
Staffing an open course is one part of the school's response to teacher departures. Leaders also need to address preparation time, classroom support, compensation, and professional growth for their existing staff. The effect on retention depends on teachers' circumstances and the working conditions they experience.
Bottom Line
Teachers leave for a combination of working conditions and life changes. Schools can address excessive workload, inadequate support, and compensation concerns while preparing separately for retirement and other planned transitions. Understanding actual departures alongside teachers' stated intentions helps leaders preserve instruction and choose responses that fit the reasons their staff give for leaving.