Despite increased concerns of financial strain in their districts, most superintendents hope to remain in their current roles next year, a new survey finds.
The AASA, the School Superintendents Association, conducted its annual survey in September and October 2025, collecting 1,951 responses from superintendents in 49 states to track trends in pay, benefits, and employment. The findings are generally representative of the larger population of superintendents, the organization said.
Here are three key findings.
1. More superintendents are concerned about economic conditions.
While a slim majority of superintendents, 51%, reported “stable economic conditions” in their districts, 38% reported declining conditions. That’s an increase from last year, when 30% reported declining conditions.
Superintendents in districts with fewer than 1,000 students were more likely to report declining conditions than their peers in larger school systems.
Those concerns come as districts report budget uncertainty caused by unpredictability in federal funding, inflation, declining enrollment, new competition from private school choice programs, and potential drops in state revenue in part due to shifting spending priorities and changes in property-tax rules under consideration in a handful of states.
A previous AASA survey released in December 2025 asked superintendents what consumes most of their time. The largest share of respondents, 54%, said finance. But far fewer, 17.8%, listed fiscal management as one of their top three strengths, ranking seventh out of 16 choices, pointing to a possible need for additional training.
2. Most superintendents plan to stay in their current roles.
Asked about their plans at the end of the current school year, 89% of superintendents said they intend to remain in their current role at their current district. That’s similar to findings in the last three years, the survey said.
The average respondent has been a superintendent for 7.3 years and has been in their current role for 5.4 years.
Education leadership researchers say consistent leadership is key to the success of school improvement and strategic initiatives, and high rates of turnover can threaten those efforts.
While many superintendents remain in steady roles, turnover rates are still higher than they were pre-pandemic, other research suggests.
The nation’s 500 largest school districts had a superintendent turnover rate of 23% during the 2024-25 school year, with 114 of those systems experiencing at least one leadership change in that time, found a September 2025 study by the ILO Group, a consulting firm that advocates for and provides support for women in educational leadership.
3. Superintendents earn more than three times the pay of starting teachers.
The average salary of superintendents who responded to the survey was $178,111.
The median salary among respondents in rural districts was $147,000, compared to $220,000 for respondents in suburban districts, and $217,500 for those in urban districts.
The median salary for female respondents, $165,000, was about 98% of the median for male respondents.
The median superintendent’s salary was 3.5 times that of the salaries for beginning teachers in the same district.
Although that’s a significant difference, it’s much less than in the private sector.
“For comparison, the AFL-CIO reported in their Executive Pay Watch study that the 2024 ratio of CEO base salary to entry level employee base salary for the 500 largest publicly traded corporations in the United States was 285:1,” the report said.
Still, other research suggests both teachers and administrators are dissatisfied with their salaries.
Superintendents and principals say it would take a 20% raise for their paychecks to be adequate, found a 2025 survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center on behalf of Allovue, a K-12 education finance company. Teachers said they would need to earn about 25% more for their pay to be adequate. (Allovue founder Jess Gartner is on the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week.)
