NC teachers start school year with ‘real money’ raises. Stein says there’s more to do

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Thousands of teachers across the state are already back at work preparing for the new school year that begins for most students next week. New teachers are starting their careers with significant raises, and teachers across the board are seeing an average 8% in their upcoming paychecks.

That’s because of the Republican-written state budget, delayed for a year by GOP arguments — including over raises — but finally passed in June and signed into law in July by Democratic Gov. Josh Stein. One of the major holdups in Republicans’ budget negotiations was over how high to make raises for teachers, with the state House of Representatives pushing for more money than the Senate. The bill passed with bipartisan support.

The biggest raises are reserved for new teachers, and while raises are part of all teachers’ salaries, veteran teachers won’t get as much as others.

Stein described the raises as “real money raises that begin to show our teachers that we value them and start to catch up to our neighboring states. But there’s more work to be done to support our teachers, especially our veteran teachers, because even with these much-needed pay raises, we still rank 40th in the country in teacher pay.”

He said he views the raises in the budget “as a launching pad, not a landing spot.”

Here are the raises for teachers and other public school employees for this school year:

Jeremiah Tucker, student body president at Broughton High School in Raleigh, said that “educators are the backbone of our society,” thanking one of his teachers at Broughton as well as his mom, Jacinta Tucker, a teacher at Oak Grove Elementary School.

“My mother’s pay doesn’t represent her sacrifices. It doesn’t account for the long hours she spent designing lesson plans for her kids. It doesn’t represent the money towards school supplies that sometimes even comes out of our own pockets,” said Tucker, who joined Stein at the news conference. He noted this year’s state budget includes “the largest wage jump teachers have seen in North Carolina in 20 years.”

He called the 8% raises and spike in starting teacher pay “a very good first step into paying teachers what they’re worth,” but one that “fails to adequately account for veteran teacher pay, affecting teachers who have been in the education system for years, if not decades.”

“It affects my mom, who’s been in the education system for nearly 30 years. There’s still work to be done, but this budget puts North Carolina on track to do that,” Tucker said.

The News & Observer asked Stein about incentives for veteran teachers to stay.

“We need our veteran teachers to stay in the profession, and we need to value them more — and show that by paying them more,” Stein told The N&O as he talked with reporters, adding that if Republican lawmakers hadn’t cut the corporate income tax rate, the state would have more revenue to spend on raises.

Bonuses of $1,750 will be paid by Oct. 31 to all school nutrition and custodial employees who work in local public schools.

And bonuses of $1,000 will be given to teachers and assistant principals with more than 16 years of experience, while $500 bonuses will go to those with fewer than 16 years of experience.

The state pay raises come as the largest school system in the state, Wake County, eliminated $1.9 million in locally funded pay raises for teachers.

Wake school board members talked about replacing that $1.9 million local salary supplement increase for all teachers with a targeted $500,000 plan to give local increases to the most senior teachers, but a majority opposed that proposal and decided to use funds for other pressing needs, The N&O reported earlier this week.

The N&O asked Stein about local school boards’ supplemental pay decisions.

“The local governments are under their own fiscal crunch, and the state is trying to take revenue options away from local governments to be able to address their needs,” he said.

“Governments should be able to determine how to prioritize their scarce tax dollars, and so they’ve just got to decide what can work for them in their own community,” Stein said.

This story was originally published August 20, 2026 at 4:02 PM with the headline “NC teachers start school year with ‘real money’ raises. Stein says there’s more to do.”