Bangladesh entrusts its teachers with educating millions of children, preparing teenagers for an increasingly competitive labour market and producing the graduates expected to drive its economy.
Yet it has compensated many of those teachers at levels closer to junior government employees than highly skilled professionals.
Bangladesh has now embarked on its biggest public-sector pay revision in more than a decade. The National Pay Scale 2026, effective retrospectively from July 1, substantially increases basic salaries across the government's 20 grades.
The increase is being phased in. Government employees in grades 10 to 20 initially receive 50% of the increase in basic salary, followed by another 25% from January 2027 and the remainder from July 2027.
Employees in grades 1 to 9 receive 40% initially, followed by two 30% increases. Revised allowances will not take effect until January 2028.
Government employees are expected to receive the first increased payment, including arrears, this month. Teachers and employees covered by the Monthly Pay Order, or MPO, system may have to wait until November or December because of administrative delays.
That distinction matters.
A government primary assistant teacher has until now entered service at grade 13 with a basic salary of 11,000 taka. Once the new scale is fully implemented, that will rise to 24,000 taka.
For now, however, the first-phase increase takes the basic salary to around 17,500 taka. Including house rent, medical and other benefits, the starting gross salary will be around 25,230 taka.
The question is not simply whether that represents an improvement. It plainly does. The question is whether it is enough to make teaching an attractive professional career.
Primary teachers require a bachelor's degree for entry. Yet assistant teachers remain in grade 13, alongside several government positions requiring substantially lower academic qualifications.
This has made their campaign for a higher grade as much a dispute about professional status as one about money.
The problem extends to career progression. Some primary teachers have spent more than two decades as assistant teachers without receiving a promotion.
A government consultation committee has proposed placing newly recruited teachers in grade 12 and creating a route to grade 11 as senior teachers, while headteachers would remain in grade 10. The proposal has yet to be implemented.
Bangladesh does not really have one teaching profession. It has several, and employment conditions can differ sharply depending on who runs the institution.
Government primary teachers are public employees. Teachers at government secondary schools and colleges are also covered by public-service salaries and benefits.
Most secondary education, however, is delivered through non-government institutions. A large proportion of their teachers depend on the government's MPO system.
According to the latest BANBEIS figures cited by government officials, there were about 5.87 lakh MPO teachers and employees in 2025, including around 4.32 lakh teachers.
They are also being brought under the National Pay Scale 2026.
Under the previous structure, many MPO secondary teachers entered at grade 10 with a basic salary of 16,000 taka. Under the new structure, that will eventually become 32,000 taka.
An MPO college lecturer generally starts at grade 9. The previous starting basic of 22,000 taka will eventually rise to 44,000 taka.
Those are significant increases. But basic salary tells only part of the story.
For years, MPO teachers had an extraordinarily small housing allowance despite soaring rents and living costs. The government eventually raised the allowance, with the rate reaching 15% of basic salary from July this year. Teachers had sought 20%, alongside improved medical and festival allowances.
Retirement has been another source of insecurity.
Thousands of retired non-government teachers and employees have waited for benefits from the Welfare Trust, sometimes for years. The government has acknowledged the backlog and says measures are now being taken to accelerate payments.
This fragmented structure means two people performing broadly similar educational functions can have markedly different financial security depending on whether their institution is government-run, MPO-listed or entirely private.
It also helps explain Bangladesh's large private-tuition economy.
Research on private tutoring in Bangladesh has repeatedly linked inadequate teacher remuneration and disparities in benefits with the incentive to seek supplementary income from coaching and tuition.
The economics are straightforward. If a full-time teaching salary cannot sustain a middle-class household, teachers have to find income elsewhere.
That creates a damaging cycle. Parents expect teachers to concentrate on classroom instruction. Teachers facing financial pressure have an incentive to teach privately after school. Families then spend more on supplementary education, reinforcing inequality between students who can afford private tuition and those who cannot.
Prime Minister Tarique Rahman acknowledged the problem in parliament in August, saying many primary and some secondary teachers were forced to take second jobs or engage in agriculture because their salaries were insufficient.
The pressures are not solely financial.
Teacher shortages and weak career structures add to the burden. More than half of the country's government primary schools were reported this year to be operating without permanent headteachers. In such schools, teachers frequently combine classroom teaching with administrative work.
Universities occupy the other end of the system, but academics face their own version of the same problem.
Under the previous public-university scale, a lecturer generally entered at grade 9 with a basic salary of 22,000 taka. An assistant professor in grade 6 started at 35,500 taka, while a professor in grade 3 started at 56,500 taka.
Under the new structure, those grades will eventually carry starting basic salaries of 44,000 taka, 71,000 taka and 1,13,000 taka respectively.
That is a substantial correction, particularly for younger academics. But university teaching has another cost: opportunity.
An academic career normally requires postgraduate qualifications, research, publication and years of specialised training. The relevant comparison is therefore not only with other government jobs but with what similarly qualified graduates can earn in banking, multinational companies, development organisations or overseas universities.
Private universities complicate the picture further. Bangladesh has no single salary structure for them. Well-funded universities can offer competitive packages, while smaller institutions may pay lecturers considerably less.
Job security, research support, retirement benefits and promotion systems also vary widely.
Recent research on Bangladeshi university teachers identifies salary and financial benefits, career opportunities, professional recognition, working environment and institutional leadership among important determinants of job satisfaction.
Cross-country salary comparisons must be handled carefully.
Exchange rates fluctuate. Purchasing power differs. Teacher qualifications are not identical, and governments structure housing, pensions and other allowances differently.
But the regional evidence still points in an uncomfortable direction.
A recent Centre for Policy Dialogue comparison of minimum secondary-school teacher salaries placed Bangladesh at the bottom of a South Asian group that included India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The comparison put Bangladesh's minimum at about $125 a month, against roughly $176 in Sri Lanka, $139 in Pakistan, $511 in India and substantially more in the Maldives.
The new Bangladeshi pay scale will narrow some of that gap. But neighbouring systems also illustrate a broader difference in how teaching is treated as a profession.
India's public higher-education system, for example, operates a dedicated UGC academic pay structure. Entry-level assistant professors receive a basic salary of 57,700 Indian rupees, while associate professors and professors move onto substantially higher scales, before allowances.
Sri Lanka maintains a dedicated Teachers Service salary structure rather than treating teaching simply as another generic category of government employment.
Nepal has also incorporated public-school teachers into public-sector salary revisions and incentive arrangements.
The Maldives supplements teacher basic salaries with additional job and attendance allowances, while Bhutan has used teaching allowances linked to experience and professional standards.
The precise amounts are less important than the policy principle.
Several South Asian systems explicitly compensate teaching as a profession, through dedicated salary scales, teaching allowances or structured progression. Bangladesh has historically relied much more heavily on the general government grade system.
That affects social status.
A profession's prestige is not determined by salary alone. But remuneration sends a signal about how the state values qualifications, responsibility and expertise.
Bangladesh currently spends about 2% of GDP on education. The government has pledged to raise that towards 5% over five years. Prime Minister Tarique has also said teacher salaries and professional status will be raised gradually.
That additional spending will matter because the teacher question cannot be solved by a pay revision alone.
The National Pay Scale 2026 is unquestionably a significant correction. A primary assistant teacher eventually moving from 11,000 taka to 24,000 taka basic, a secondary MPO teacher from 16,000 taka to 32,000 taka and a college lecturer from 22,000 taka to 44,000 taka represents a substantial nominal improvement.
Years of inflation, however, have already eroded purchasing power. Economists at CPD have pointed out that the long gap between national pay revisions allowed real incomes, particularly among lower- and middle-grade employees, to deteriorate considerably.
Doubling a low base therefore does not necessarily create a highly paid profession. The larger challenge is structural.
Bangladesh needs a career path that allows a primary teacher to progress rather than remain an assistant teacher for decades. It needs to reduce the disparity between government and non-government teachers, ensure retirement benefits arrive when teachers retire, reward additional qualifications and training, and create academic salaries capable of retaining talented university graduates.
Above all, it needs to decide where teachers belong in the country's professional hierarchy.
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