Teacher Mental Health Statistics: Stress, Burnout, and Attrition

Teaching is often described as a calling, but the day-to-day reality for many U.S. educators looks less like inspiration and more like exhaustion. In 2024, 60% of teachers reported being burned out and 59% reported frequent job-related stress, according to the RAND Corporation’s State of the American Teacher survey (RAND, 2024). Those numbers place teaching among the more emotionally demanding occupations in the country.

RAND is a research and polling organization, and its State of the American Teacher series is a survey — one funded in part by the two largest teacher unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). That funding does not make the findings less useful, but it does mean these are self-reported survey results rather than government statistics, and they should be read as such.

This article walks through what the most recent teacher surveys actually show: the headline burnout and stress figures, how teachers compare with other working adults, the persistent gap between female and male teachers, how the picture has shifted since the pandemic, and what the peer-reviewed literature adds about the wide global variation in teacher burnout.

The 2024 Teacher Mental Health Figures

The 2024 State of the American Teacher survey paints a consistent picture of a workforce under strain. Beyond the headline stress and burnout numbers, RAND documented meaningful shares of teachers struggling to cope and showing clinical warning signs (RAND, 2024).

The depression-symptom figure deserves a note on interpretation. RAND’s survey screens for symptoms of depression; a positive screen is not a clinical diagnosis, and it is not the same as a doctor confirming major depressive disorder. Still, roughly one in five teachers showing depressive symptoms is a signal that the emotional demands of the job are reaching a substantial share of the workforce.

The attrition numbers matter for schools and students alike. When more than one in five teachers say they may leave their position within the year, and nearly one in six plan to exit teaching altogether, staffing stability and continuity of instruction are directly at stake.

How Teachers Compare With Other Working Adults

A survey figure in isolation is hard to interpret — 60% burnout could reflect the profession or simply reflect a stressed national workforce. To address that, RAND compared teachers with a sample of similar working adults. The gap was striking (RAND, 2024).

In other words, teachers were roughly twice as likely as demographically similar employed adults to report frequent stress or burnout, and about three times as likely to report difficulty coping with that stress. The coping gap is the most telling of the three: it suggests the issue is not only how much stress teachers carry, but how few resources and how little slack they have to manage it.

It is worth framing what “burnout” means here. The World Health Organization classifies burn-out as an “occupational phenomenon” resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and it is explicitly not classified as a medical condition (WHO, 2019). Burnout is characterized by three dimensions — exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism about one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy. So when 60% of teachers report burnout, that reflects a work-driven syndrome, not a diagnosable illness. It is a useful distinction when comparing the burnout figures with the separate, symptom-based depression screen.

The Gap Between Female and Male Teachers

The teaching workforce is disproportionately female, and RAND’s data show that female teachers consistently reported higher rates of frequent stress and burnout than their male colleagues (RAND, 2024). This mirrors a broader pattern seen across many occupations and across the general population, where women more often report anxiety and depression symptoms than men.

For a field with a predominantly female workforce, the female-teacher gap is not a footnote — it shapes the overall averages. Any read of the headline burnout and stress numbers should keep in mind that the typical teacher these figures describe is a woman, and that the mental health burden of the profession is not evenly distributed across it.

The Pandemic Baseline and the 2025 Improvement

Teacher strain did not begin with these surveys, and the trend line offers some cautious encouragement. Back in 2021, near the height of pandemic disruption, nearly one in four teachers said they were likely to leave their job by the end of the 2020–21 school year — up from roughly one in six before the pandemic (RAND, 2025). Elevated intent-to-leave, in other words, was a pandemic-era spike above a lower baseline.

By 2025, that pressure had eased somewhat. RAND’s intent-to-leave figure fell to 16% in 2025, down from 22% in 2024 (RAND, 2025). That is a meaningful year-over-year improvement, and it brings the share of teachers eyeing the exit back toward pre-pandemic territory.

The improvement should be read carefully. Intent-to-leave falling does not mean burnout and stress have resolved — those measures remained high in 2024 — but it does suggest the acute post-pandemic churn is subsiding. Whether the 2025 improvement holds is a question only future surveys can answer.

What the Peer-Reviewed Literature Adds

RAND’s surveys are U.S.-focused and recent, but they are not the only lens on teacher mental health. A 2022 peer-reviewed scoping review published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health pooled studies of teacher burnout from around the world and found enormous variation: reported burnout prevalence ranged from 2.81% to 70.9%, with a median of about 28.8%, while depression among teachers had a median prevalence of roughly 30.7% (Ozamiz-Etxebarria et al., 2022).

That extraordinary range — from under 3% to over 70% — is itself the finding. It reflects how much burnout estimates depend on the measurement tool, the cutoff used to define “burned out,” the country and school system studied, and the timing relative to events like the pandemic. It is a reminder that a single burnout percentage, including RAND’s 60%, is a product of survey methodology as much as of underlying reality.

Crucially, the United States lacks a single authoritative federal statistic for teacher burnout. There is no government agency publishing an official teacher-burnout rate the way agencies track, say, unemployment. That gap is why survey organizations like RAND fill such a central role in this topic — and why it matters to label their numbers as survey findings rather than official government data.

For readers interested in the flip side of the classroom, the pressures on educators connect directly to student wellbeing; our overview of how schools address youth mental health looks at the support systems teachers are often asked to help deliver. Teacher burnout also sits within a much larger workplace-wellbeing story covered in our roundup of burnout statistics across occupations, and within the national picture of any mental illness among U.S. adults.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of teachers experience burnout?

In RAND’s 2024 State of the American Teacher survey, 60% of teachers reported being burned out and 59% reported frequent job-related stress (RAND, 2024). These are self-reported survey findings, not government statistics, and the United States has no single official federal teacher-burnout figure.

Are teachers more stressed than other workers?

According to RAND’s 2024 survey, about twice as many teachers as comparable working adults reported frequent job-related stress or burnout, and roughly three times as many reported difficulty coping with stress (RAND, 2024). The comparison used a sample of demographically similar employed adults.

How many teachers show signs of depression?

Nearly one in five teachers — roughly 20% — showed symptoms of depression in RAND’s 2024 survey (RAND, 2024). A positive symptom screen is not a clinical diagnosis, but it indicates that depressive symptoms reach a substantial share of the teaching workforce.

Is teacher burnout a mental illness?

No. The World Health Organization classifies burn-out as an “occupational phenomenon” resulting from unmanaged chronic workplace stress, and states it is not classified as a medical condition (WHO, 2019). Depression, which some teachers also report, is a separate, diagnosable condition.

Are fewer teachers planning to quit now?

Yes, at least in the most recent data. RAND reported that teachers’ intent to leave fell to 16% in 2025 from 22% in 2024, moving back toward pre-pandemic levels after a spike in which nearly one in four teachers considered leaving in 2021 (RAND, 2025).

Sources

1. World Health Organization. Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. WHO; 2019. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases

2. RAND Corporation. State of the American Teacher, 2024 (RR-A1108-12). RAND; 2024. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-12.html

3. RAND Corporation. Teachers Are Still Stressed and Underpaid Post-COVID. RAND; 2024. https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2024/teachers-are-still-stressed-and-underpaid-post-covid.html

4. RAND Corporation. State of the American Teacher, 2025 (RR-A1108-16). RAND; 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-16.html

5. Ozamiz-Etxebarria N, et al. Prevalence of Burnout Among Teachers: A Scoping Review. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9518388/