The context right now
Schools compete for workers with every other employer. An unfilled position means something different when one job in thirteen is open across the economy than when openings are scarce. So the first question about any "shortage" is how tight the whole labor market is.
Education and the whole labor market since 2000
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) has no category for public schools. The closest is state & local government education: public school districts plus public colleges and universities, all occupations pooled together. It is shown below against all sectors and against the rest of state and local government.
Job openings rate
Seasonally adjusted. The Shaded bands are recessions (NBER). Source: BLS JOLTS, via the BLS Public Data API.
Education relative to the whole market
State & local education rate as a percent of the all-sector rate, same measure as above
Computed here from the two published rates. 100% would mean education looks exactly like the economy as a whole. Below 100%, education's rate is lower.
Openings per unemployed person
All job openings divided by all unemployed people
Computed from JOLTS openings (JTSJOL) and CPS unemployed (UNEMPLOY). Above 1, there are more openings than unemployed people. Months missing at the source are left as gaps.
How education compares with other industries
Seasonally adjusted, as published by BLS. "Educational services" in JOLTS is private education only. A few small industries (mining & logging; transportation, warehousing & utilities) are omitted because the BLS API does not return them.
How many people public education employs
Vacancies are only half the picture. A school system can report more openings because it is trying to employ more people. The chart indexes employment to February 2020, the last month before the pandemic.
Employment, indexed to February 2020 = 100
Local government education (mostly K-12), state government education (mostly higher education), and all nonfarm jobs
Seasonally adjusted. BLS Current Employment Statistics: CES9093161101, CES9092161101, and total nonfarm (CES0000000001), via the BLS Public Data API. Counts people on payrolls, not FTE. Uses the period selected above.
What states actually count
No federal administrative collection counts unfilled teacher or school-staff positions. What exists is a patchwork of state surveys, and only a minority of states publish anything usable. This panel uses five states that publish rates (Illinois, Virginia, Iowa, South Carolina, Colorado) and one that publishes counts only (Nebraska). Each is an annual snapshot published months later, and each state defines "unfilled" its own way. Recent figures were checked against each agency's own publication, and the provenance page records exactly what was verified and what was carried over from earlier work. None is interpolated.
What counts as a "vacancy"
The word means different things in different sources. Some count positions empty on one day; one counts a year of unfilled job postings; one counts only positions empty all year. Some treat a position covered by a substitute as filled, others as vacant. Read every number below with its definition.
Each state's reported vacancy rate, against the national labor market
Percent of positions unfilled, by school year, as each state defines it. Same scale in every panel
The orange line is the closest national comparison for the first group: the NCES School Pulse Panel's estimate of the share of public school teaching positions vacant in October (a survey estimate, rounded to whole percents, last collected in October 2024). Gray lines are national JOLTS job openings rates for October, not seasonally adjusted. They show where the labor market stood, not what a state's rate "should" be. JOLTS counts positions being actively recruited for, and its education line pools colleges and all staff. Iowa's figures are plotted at the school year their 12-month posting window covers, one year earlier than the year Iowa's press releases use. Breaks in a line mark years with no published rate. They are not zeros. Hover over or tab through a panel for each point's source note.
Why only these states?
Each state's sources, notes, and gaps
Teachers specifically
Vacancy rates by role in public schools, nationally
NCES School Pulse Panel, a survey of about 4,000 public schools; NCES calls these estimates experimental. Principals reported, for each role, total positions ("filled + vacant") and vacancies. Rates are rounded to whole percents by NCES, so small differences between roles are not meaningful. Hover over a bar for every October wave and its 95% confidence interval.
Pooled figures hide which jobs are hard to fill. Illinois publishes filled and unfilled positions by job category, and the teaching rate is not the highest.
Illinois vacancy rates by position category
Unfilled ÷ (filled + unfilled), October 1 snapshots, computed from ISBE's published FTE
SY23–SY25 pair each year's unfilled FTE with the prior year's filled FTE, following ISBE's own convention. SY22 is a same-year pairing. "All staff" is the sum of the four categories, computed here.
A rough split of education openings
Nebraska: vacant vs. "unfilled"
Positions at the start of the school year: teachers and specialists, public and nonpublic schools. No denominator is published
Nebraska Department of Education, Teacher Vacancy Survey. Counts only. No rate can be computed.
What these data cannot say
- There is no ongoing national teacher-vacancy count. JOLTS measures industries, not occupations. NCES's School Pulse Panel, a survey of public schools, estimated that about 3% of teaching positions were vacant in October 2023 and October 2024 (4% in October 2022), but its last staffing wave was October 2024. Any other national teacher figure is either a model (like the split above, labeled as one) or an aggregation of unlike state definitions.
- State levels are not cross-state rankings. Definitions and frames differ. Trends within a state over time are the defensible comparison.
- Annual snapshots cannot show within-year dynamics. State surveys observe one fall date per year, published three to six months later. They cannot show positions that were hard to fill but were filled by October.
- A vacancy is not a quality judgment, and neither is a credential category. These data count empty budgeted positions and, separately, credential status. They do not measure how well students were taught.
- National shortages can coexist with local ones. Averages can hide severe shortages in particular subjects (such as special education), places, or schools.
- Computed rates carry their conventions. Where this page computes a rate from published components, it says so, and the components are in the downloadable data.
- JOLTS is revised. The latest month is preliminary and each month is revised once. Annual benchmark revisions can change the whole history. This page re-pulls the full history every update.
Methods, sources, and data
Rates. Every rate on this page has the same form: openings (or unfilled positions) ÷ (employment + openings), or unfilled ÷ (filled + unfilled), as a percent. Because it is a rate rather than a count, it can be compared across time and across industries of very different sizes.
National data come from the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey and Current Employment Statistics, retrieved from the BLS Public Data API (economy-wide JOLTS series JTS000000000000000JOR and related, CPS unemployment LNS13000000 and LNS14000000, CES employment CES0000000001, CES9093161101, CES9092161101, and industry series JTSiiiiii000000000XXX, including 923000 state & local education and 929000 state & local excluding education). Seasonally adjusted except the October state benchmarks, which use the not-seasonally-adjusted series JTU923000000000000JOR and JTU000000000000000JOR. An automated job refreshes these data weekly, so new JOLTS releases appear within days.
School Pulse Panel estimates come from the NCES "Staff Vacancies" workbook (nces.ed.gov/surveys/spp), re-checked automatically for new waves. They are shown as NCES publishes them: percent of positions vacant, rounded to whole percents, with standard errors used for the confidence intervals in tooltips.
State data are curated by hand from state agency publications (sources listed under each state above) and updated as states release new figures. The provenance page records, state by state, which figures were checked against the agency's own publication and which were carried over without re-checking. Where a state publishes a rate, the published rate is shown. Where it publishes only the components, the rate is computed and labeled. Where no denominator exists, no rate is shown.
Full documentation of every series (who publishes it, the exact file, how it is retrieved, every transformation, and known problems) is on the data provenance page.
Composition split. The rough split of state & local education openings is a model. It assigns openings pro-rata using the CES local/state government education employment shares (local is overwhelmingly K-12, state overwhelmingly higher education) and the NCES Common Core of Data teacher share of K-12 staff FTE. It assumes every group has the same vacancy rate, which is not true. Treat it as context for the pooled rate, not a count of teacher vacancies.
Download: National monthly series (CSV) · National data (JSON) · State panel with notes (JSON) · School Pulse Panel extract (JSON) · 50-state inventory (JSON)