Why Record Numbers of Teachers Are Planning Their Exit in 2026

Can we be honest with each other for a minute?

If you've been quietly googling "business ideas for teachers" at 11pm, deleting your search history like you did something wrong, I need you to know something. You are not the only one. Not even close.

The data on teachers leaving the profession right now is stunning. And I don't share it to be doom and gloom. I share it because if you've been feeling like maybe something is wrong with you for dreaming about working for yourself, the numbers tell a very different story.

The numbers, teacher to teacher

Let's start with the big one. Roughly 1 in 7 public school teachers now changes schools or leaves the profession every single year. That's a higher turnover rate than we saw in the 1990s. Think about your own building. Count the staff. One in seven, every year.

And the pipeline of people thinking about leaving is even bigger than the number actually walking out. A RAND survey found that heading into the end of this school year, just under a fifth of teachers planned to leave their jobs. In California, a state teachers association survey found 4 in 10 educators considering leaving in the next few years, and nearly half of them pointed to money as the reason. Zoom out further and an estimated 35 percent of teachers say they plan to be out of the profession within the decade.

Here's the detail that gets me, though. Nearly 3 in 4 teachers who moved or left did so voluntarily, and before retirement age. These aren't people aging out. These are people in the middle of their careers looking around and saying, I can't do this for twenty more years.

Sound familiar?

It's not the kids. It's everything around the kids.

When researchers ask teachers why they're leaving or thinking about it, the answers are painfully consistent: unmanageable workloads, endless paperwork, student behavior challenges, lack of support from administration, and pay that doesn't match any of it.

Notice what's not on that list. Teaching. The actual moments with students. Almost nobody leaves because they stopped loving the work of teaching. They leave because the conditions around the work became impossible.

That distinction matters, because so many teachers carry guilt about wanting out, as if leaving means they didn't love their students enough. The data says otherwise. You can love teaching and still be unable to survive the job it has become. Both things are true, and millions of your colleagues are living the same contradiction.

Most teachers are already running a business. It's just not theirs.

Let's talk about the part we're all too polite to say in the staff lounge.

A 2026 Gallup survey with the Bipartisan Policy Center found that 71 percent of public school teachers hold at least one side job. Seventy-one percent. And only 28 percent of teachers say they're living comfortably on their household income.

So when you see your coworker tutoring after school, selling resources online, or coaching on weekends, that's not hustle culture. That's a profession where one full-time job, a job that requires a degree and a license, isn't enough to live on for most people.

But look closer at what those side jobs actually are. Tutoring. Creating and selling curriculum. Coaching. Teaching lessons. Those aren't just side jobs. Those are businesses, run in miniature, on exhausted evenings, for extra grocery money. Most teachers are already doing entrepreneurial work. The difference between where you are and where you dream of being isn't ability. It's that nobody ever showed you how to turn the skill into the whole plan instead of the side of the plate.

Here's the part that might surprise you

With all of that said, here's the stat I find most hopeful: of the teachers who leave the classroom, almost 40 percent stay in education in some form.

And a growing share of them aren't going to work for someone else. They're building something of their own. Former teachers are launching tutoring practices, curriculum companies, coaching businesses, enrichment programs, consulting services, and microschools. They take everything they learned in the classroom, the planning, the communication, the ability to explain anything to anyone, and use it as the foundation of a business where they set the conditions.

So if part of what's kept you stuck is the idea that leaving means throwing away your identity, your degree, or your purpose, the data disagrees. Thousands of educators walk out of the classroom every year and put their purpose to work in a business with their own name on it.

What this means for you

Maybe nothing yet. Maybe you read this and decide you're staying, and that's a completely valid choice. Plenty of teachers find ways to make it work, and the profession needs them.

But if you've been sitting with that restless feeling, wondering if you're broken, ungrateful, or crazy for dreaming about being your own boss, I hope the numbers gave you what they gave me: permission to stop whispering about it.

You're not a bad teacher for thinking about leaving. You're one of hundreds of thousands of educators responding rationally to the same conditions, and one of many quietly realizing they'd rather build their own thing than beg a broken system to change. The question was never whether something is wrong with you. The question is what you want to build next, and that's a question you get to answer on purpose, with a plan.

That's what this blog is here for.

Did this resonate with you? If so, stick around. The blog and newsletter are full of honest, practical guidance for educators building their way out of the classroom. Stop surviving the classroom. Start building your next chapter.

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