The conclusions are part of the Education at a Glance 2023 study, which was released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). According to the report, on average, the real annual salary of secondary school teachers is $53,456 (49,789 euros at the current exchange rate) across the OECD. In Portugal, the “salary adjusted in purchasing power parity is 44,277 dollars, which is equivalent to 29,100 euros”, it reads.

“Teacher salaries are an important determining factor in the attractiveness of the teaching profession, but they also represent the largest category of expenses in the formal education sector”, says the organization. According to the OECD, the unfreezing of Civil Service careers in 2018 “allowed the gradual recovery of teachers’ salaries until 2022”.

Still, this recovery was not enough to recover purchasing power, given that between 2015 and 2022 the salaries of secondary school teachers in Portugal fell by 1% in real terms, which contrasts with what happened in most OECD countries, in which salaries increased, on average, 4% in this period.

However, looking only at Portugal, teachers “earn 42% more than workers with higher education”. “The effective average salaries of teachers continue to be higher than the earnings of workers with higher education since the teaching population is aging and, consequently, a large proportion of teachers are close to the top of their career”.