Educator Turnover Rates Stabilize After the Pandemic

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School districts continue to suffer in the aftermath of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In addition to an acceleration of a longer-term decline in teacher satisfaction (Baker and Koedel, 2025; Kraft and Lyon, 2024; Steiner, Schwartz, and Diliberti, 2022), resignations and retirements among teachers and principals spiked nationally in the United States and in several states following the 2021–2022 school year (Barnum, 2023; Diliberti and Schwartz, 2023). Since 2022, teacher well-being appears to have risen and stabilized after pandemic-era lows (Kurtz, 2024; Steiner et al., 2025). And yet, 16 percent of teachers still reported intentions to leave their jobs in the 2024–2025 school year (Steiner et al., 2025).

Districts and education policy researchers continue to wonder whether educator turnover rates will ultimately return to, or fall below, prepandemic levels. In this report—which is an update of our prior research on this topic (Diliberti and Schwartz, 2023; Diliberti and Schwartz, 2024; Diliberti and Schwartz, 2025)⁠^[1]—we add a fifth school year (2024–2025) to our annual tracking of district-reported national turnover rates for public school teachers and principals.⁠^[2] Although our data are based on district-reported teacher and principal resignations as opposed to objective administrative data, RAND’s work tracking educator turnover rates fills a critical gap in national data that are available on this topic.⁠^[3] This report is part of a series that provides brief analyses of district leaders’ viewpoints on topics of immediate interest to policymakers, practitioners, and researchers.

The newest data presented in this report come from the fall 2025 American School District Panel (ASDP) survey. We combine these fall 2025 survey data with those from prior ASDP surveys administered in the fall of each preceding school year. Our annual surveys ask districts to estimate what percentages of their teachers and school principals retired or resigned in the previous school year, which we then average. We used districts’ answers to construct national estimates of educator turnover, which we define as the estimated average percentage of teachers and principals who leave the profession voluntarily through retirement or resignation. All turnover estimates that we discuss in this report, including prepandemic estimates, are constructed from districts’ responses to our ASDP surveys. Differences across time points should be interpreted with caution as they may reflect uncertainty associated with survey estimates.

District Leaders’ Estimates Indicate That Teacher Turnover Has Dropped Close to Prepandemic Levels

According to reports from ASDP districts, the rate of teacher turnover nationally spiked in the 2021–2022 school year to 4.3 percentage points above prepandemic levels (see Panel A in Figure 1). This ASDP district–reported national spike was later confirmed by administrative data from multiple states (Barnum, 2023; Bastian and Fuller, 2024; Camp, Zamarro, and McGee, 2024; Clark, 2023; Fuller, 2023; Hamidu, 2023; Knight et al., 2023).

Also shown in Panel A of Figure 1, ASDP district leaders’ estimates suggest that this elevated teacher turnover during the pandemic began to ease in the 2022–2023 school year and continued to decline in the 2023–2024 school year, falling from an average of 9.1 percent to 7.2 percent of teachers retiring or resigning—a decrease of nearly 2 percentage points. Our most recent data from the 2024–2025 school year show that teacher turnover continues to trend downward, although at a somewhat slower pace, to an average of 6.7 percent of teachers retiring or resigning at some point during the school year (only about half a percentage point less). Still, this brings the average turnover for teachers much closer to the prepandemic level of 5.7 percent, at least according to district reports.

Administrative data from two states (North Carolina and Arkansas) further support districts’ estimates that teacher turnover began to recover in the 2022–2023 school year following a spike in 2021–2022 (Bastian and Fuller, 2024; Camp, Zamarro, and McGee, 2024). However, we were not able to identify any data sources that have published more-recent teacher turnover rates to confirm or refute districts’ estimates for the 2023–2024 or 2024–2025 school years.

Districts’ Estimates Show That Principal Turnover Has Declined but Remains Above Prepandemic Levels

As shown in Figure 1, the national trend in turnover for principals looks slightly different from that for teachers, largely because of a lower prepandemic turnover rate and a higher pandemic peak turnover rate.⁠^[4]

As shown in Panel B of Figure 1, ASDP district leaders’ estimates of principals retiring or resigning indicate a large drop from the pandemic peak average of 16 percent during the 2021–2022 school year to an average of 9.2 percent during the 2022–2023 school year. Since then, principal turnover rates have slowly continued a downward trend, with districts estimating, on average, 8.5 percent of principals leaving in the 2023–2024 school year (a little more than half a percentage point less than the prior year) and 8.2 percent of principals leaving in the 2024–2025 school year (a difference of less than half a percentage point from the prior year).

At least according to district reports, principal turnover in the 2024–2025 school year remains higher than prepandemic levels, although the downward trend is a promising sign that turnover rates have largely recovered from pandemic times.

In Spite of Overall Declines in Educator Turnover, Urban Teacher Turnover Remains Elevated

Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, urban districts reported higher teacher turnover rates than their nonurban peers (see Table 1). During the pandemic, teacher turnover rates rose across all types of districts, as shown in Figure 2. However, the teacher turnover rate rose most sharply in urban districts, which expanded the preexisting gaps in teacher turnover rates by district locale. The same pattern was not apparent among principals (see Table 1).

By the 2021–2022 school year, urban districts reported a teacher turnover rate of 14.1 percent compared with 8.1 percent in suburban districts. Since then, reported teacher turnover in urban districts declined to 8.6 percent in 2023–2024, but, in this most recent school year, urban districts reported 11.1-percent turnover. As of the 2024–2025 school year, teacher turnover in urban districts was significantly and substantively higher than turnover in nonurban settings. This means that the 0.5-percentage point overall decrease in estimated teacher turnover appears to be driven by suburban and rural districts. Although previous increases in estimated teacher turnover rates appear to be attributable to teaching conditions brought on by the pandemic, it is not clear whether other factors (such as teacher retirements linked to enrollment declines) may be contributing to these ongoing disparities.

The figure is a line chart showing how the percentage of teachers who retired or resigned changed by school year and by district locale (urban, suburban, rural). The period of the COVID-19 pandemic spans school years 2020–2021 through 2021–2022.

• Prepandemic: Urban 8.6%, Suburban 5.8%, Rural 4.5%
• SY 2020–2021: Urban 8.0%, Suburban 6.1%, Rural 5.4%
• SY 2021–2022: Urban 14.1%*, Suburban 10.4%, Rural 8.1%
• SY 2022–2023: Urban 13.1%*, Suburban 9.4%, Rural 7.4%
• SY 2023–2024: Urban 8.6%, Suburban 6.9%, Rural 6.8%
• SY 2024–2025: Urban 11.1%*, Suburban 6.6%, Rural 5.9%

NOTE: This figure depicts response data from the following survey questions: “What percentage of your teachers retired or resigned at any point during the [numeric school year] school year? Include those who left during the school year or at the end of it.” We posed this question in fall 2025 about the 2024–2025 school year (n = 315), in fall 2024 about the 2023–2024 school year (n = 285), in fall 2023 about the 2022–2023 school year (n = 228), and in fall 2022 about the 2021–2022 school year (n = 295). In summer 2021, we posed the following questions: “What was the typical percentage of your teachers who retired or resigned annually prepandemic?” (n = 279) and “What percentage of your teachers retired or resigned at the end of the 2020–2021 school year?” (n = 278). For all questions, respondents were asked to enter a percentage into a text box. Figures present the average turnover rate reported by districts. Data labels are rounded to the nearest tenths place. Numbers with an asterisk (*) indicate a significant difference between that subgroup and the other subgroups (i.e., urban versus nonurban schools) with a p-value of less than 0.05.

Limitations of Our Analysis

We caution readers that these educator turnover estimates have the following limitations, which align with the limitations we presented in prior reports on this topic (Diliberti and Schwartz, 2023; Diliberti and Schwartz, 2024; Diliberti and Schwartz, 2025):

• Our numbers are estimates provided by districts rather than taken directly from employment records. It is possible that districts’ self-reports could over- or underestimate the actual turnover rate.
• We asked districts in summer 2021 to estimate their typical prepandemic turnover rates, which were rates from more than a year before. Thus, district reports likely have some recall bias—either because respondents could not accurately remember their prepandemic turnover rates or because respondents might have been overly optimistic in recalling the past.
• Our data about turnover for the 2020–2021 school year were collected in summer 2021. In contrast, our data for the 2021–2022, 2022–2023, 2023–2024, and 2024–2025 school years were collected in the fall of the subsequent school year. Therefore, districts’ estimates of educator turnover in 2020–2021 represent a shorter time frame (i.e., these estimates do not include the entire summer), which perhaps contributes to the lower turnover rates reported in that particular school year.
• Comparisons across time points should be interpreted with caution because some differences that appear to be changes over time might be due to uncertainty associated with survey estimates in each period. For this reason, we include confidence intervals for all survey estimates shown in Table 1.

Despite these limitations, we present these survey data for two reasons. First, to our knowledge, these are some of the only yearly national data on educator turnover rates. Second, these national data cover the most recent school year (2024–2025), whereas other national data sources are several school years behind.⁠^[5]

Summary

Elevated educator turnover has been shown to disrupt schooling and negatively affect student academic performance (Béteille, Kalogrides, and Loeb, 2012; Ronfeldt, Loeb, and Wyckoff, 2013). Even as the factors driving changes in educator turnover continue to evolve, monitoring these trends provides an important barometer of the health of the profession and, subsequently, of students’ experiences in schools.

Our latest estimates of educator turnover rates nationally suggest a continued, steady decline in retirements and resignations among both teachers and principals. Rates continue to approach prepandemic levels, which is suggestive of a broader return to more-typical levels after the disruptions of the pandemic period. However, reported turnover rates still remain somewhat above prepandemic levels. Moreover, our results highlight the continuation of long-standing disparities in teacher turnover between urban and nonurban school districts in particular.

Our findings are consistent with other research about teachers’ intentions to leave their jobs and about their self-reported well-being (Kurtz, 2024; Steiner et al., 2025). In line with our own findings, this research suggests continued elevated challenges (e.g., stress and burnout) for teachers relative to prepandemic levels, which could contribute to higher turnover. Another contributing factor could be ongoing declines in public school enrollment since the pandemic, which might contribute to an increase in educator retirement rates (as well as layoffs, which we do not measure) in affected districts (National Center for Education Statistics, undated-a; National Center for Education Statistics, undated-b). As more time passes, it will become more difficult to disentangle any lingering effects of the pandemic from other factors that may be contributing to educators’ decisions to leave the profession.

Notes

1. Because this report is a direct update of prior research, we use language that may closely align with language that was used in Diliberti and Schwartz (2025) to describe findings from prior years and information that did change, including descriptions of how these data were collected and prepared for reporting, findings from administrative data in prior years, and limitations to our data. Return to content ⤴
2. We use turnover to refer specifically to districts’ reports of teachers’ and principals’ resignations and retirements from their schools and do not include other potential causes of turnover, such as layoffs or terminations. We do not parse out rates for resignations separately from retirements. Return to content ⤴
3. Although others have gathered and analyzed teacher hiring and retention data in specific years (Frontline Education, 2025; Goldring, Taie, and O’Rear, 2018; Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023a; Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023b), our research is, to the best of our knowledge, the only research to consistently track estimated teacher and principal turnover rates each year since the 2020–2021 school year. Return to content ⤴
4. Districts’ reports of about a 3-percent turnover rate among principals prior to the pandemic likely underestimate the true principal turnover rate based on data collected in a federal survey of principals before the pandemic began (Goldring, Taie, and O’Rear, 2018). At that time, 6 percent of school principals were categorized as movers (i.e., moving from one school to another) and 10 percent were categorized as leavers (Goldring, Taie, and O’Rear, 2018). The most recent data collection from the National Center for Education Statistics’ National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) categorized 6 percent of school principals as movers and another 11 percent as leavers—at most, a marginal increase over prepandemic levels (Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023a). Our prepandemic and 2020–2021 school principal turnover estimates are substantially lower than those observed in the NTPS reports, perhaps because of sampling error, as well as our method, which focuses only on leavers (from a district). Return to content ⤴
5. The NTPS also provides national data on educator attrition and mobility that bridge the prepandemic and pandemic eras. As of the writing of this report in 2026, the most recent NTPS data cover educator attrition and mobility that occurred between the 2020–2021 and 2021–2022 school years, which are roughly analogous to our 2020–2021 estimates (Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023a; Taie, Lewis, and Merlin, 2023b). Return to content ⤴

References

• Baker, Sofia P., and Cory Koedel, “The Decline in Teacher Working Conditions During and After the COVID Pandemic,” Annenberg Institute, Brown University, EdWorkingPaper No. 24-1000, January 2025.
• Barnum, Matt, “Teacher Turnover Hits New Highs Across the U.S.,” Chalkbeat, March 6, 2023.
• Bastian, Kevin C., and Sarah Crittenden Fuller, “Educator Attrition in North Carolina Public Schools: Updates Through September 2023,” EPIC Insights, Education Policy Initiative at Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, January 2024.
• Béteille, Tara, Demetra Kalogrides, and Susanna Loeb, “Stepping Stones: Principal Career Paths and School Outcomes,” Social Science Research, Vol. 41, No. 4, July 2012.
• Camp, Andrew M., Gema Zamarro, and Josh McGee, “Arkansas Teacher Retention Entering the 2023-24 School Year,” Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas, EDRE Research Brief 2023-03, January 13, 2024.
• Clark, Jess, “Kentucky Teacher Turnover Reaches New Heights,” Louisville Public Media, December 29, 2023.
• Diliberti, Melissa Kay, and Heather L. Schwartz, Educator Turnover Has Markedly Increased, but Districts Have Taken Actions to Boost Teacher Ranks: Selected Findings from the Sixth American School District Panel Survey, RAND Corporation, RR-A956-14, 2023. As of January 16, 2024: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA956-14.html
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• Goldring, Rebecca, Soheyla Taie, and Isaiah O’Rear, Principal Attrition and Mobility: Results from the 2016–17 Principal Follow Up Survey, First Look, National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2018066, July 2018.
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• Master, Benjamin K., Claude Messan Setodji, Gerald P. Hunter, Samantha E. DiNicola, and AK Keskin, Technical Documentation for the Twelfth American School District Panel Survey, RAND Corporation, RR-A4737-2, 2026. As of March 2026: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4737-2.html
• National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data: America’s Public Schools, “Table 2. Number of Operating Public Elementary and Secondary Schools and Districts, Student Membership, Teachers, and Pupil/Teacher Ratio, by State or Jurisdiction: School Year 2024–25,” webpage, U.S. Department of Education, undated-a. As of February 10, 2026: https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/tables/202425_summary_2.asp
• National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data: America’s Public Schools, “Table 2. Number of Operating Public Schools and Districts, Student Membership, Teachers, and Pupil/Teacher Ratio, by State or Jurisdiction: School Year 2019–20,” webpage, U.S. Department of Education, undated-b. As of February 10, 2026: https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/tables/201920_summary_2.asp
• Ronfeldt, Matthew, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff, “How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement,” American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2013.
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• Steiner, Elizabeth D., Heather Schwartz, and Melissa Kay Diliberti, “Educators’ Poor Morale Matters, Even If They Don’t Quit. Here’s Why,” The 74, August 8, 2022.
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• Taie, Soheyla, Laurie Lewis, and Julia Merlin, Teacher Attrition and Mobility: Results from the 2021-22 Teacher Follow-Up Survey to the National Teacher and Principal Survey, Institute of Education Sciences, NCES 2024-039, December 2023b.

Topics

• Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
• Principals
• Teachers and Teaching