Tool

State Teacher Shortages 2026 Update

Teaching Positions Left Vacant or Filled by Teachers Without Full Certification

Published

July 6, 2026

By Tiffany S. Tan Gian Anthony Baez Susan Kemper Patrick

Empty classroom with a chalkboard and teacher's desk.

2026 Tool

To understand how states are experiencing teacher shortages around the country, the Learning Policy Institute reviewed teacher workforce reports and state agency documents covering the most recent school years. These state-specific data sources are used to estimate the number of teachers not fully certified for their teaching assignments, as well as count the number of unfilled teaching positions reported by each state. State laws typically specify that teachers who are not fully certified can be hired or assigned only if a fully certified teacher is not available. Therefore, both data points provide a strong indicator of the severity of shortages, but not all states report these data.

Based on the latest available data from the states with published information, all 50 states plus the District of Columbia employed an estimated 387,843 teachers who were not fully certified for their teaching assignments. Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia published data on vacancies, with 37,569 unfilled teacher positions. (See Table 1.) These estimates indicate that, at a minimum, 425,412 positions were either unfilled or filled by teachers not fully certified for their assignments, representing about 1 in 8 of all teaching positions nationally.

Table 1. Teachers Without Full Certification and Unfilled Positions for All Reporting States — Note: For the 2024–25 school year, the full-time equivalent (FTE) teacher data point for Tennessee was missing in the Common Core of Data, so we used the FTE teacher data point provided in the state report card.
Source: Learning Policy Institute analysis of state-reported data sources (see Table 2). Total number of teachers drawn from U.S. Department of Education. (2025). *Full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers*. The data source is the National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), “State Nonfiscal Public Elementary/Secondary Education Survey,” 2024–25 v.1a.

State Teacher Shortages 2026 Update: Teaching Positions Left Vacant or Filled by Teachers Without Full Certification by Tiffany S. Tan, Gian Anthony Baez,, and Susan Kemper Patrick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Core operating support for the Learning Policy Institute is provided by the Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. We are grateful to them for their generous support. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.