North Carolina finally broke a nearly 1,000-day budget impasse. Hawaii's governor signed automatic step pay increases into law as of August 19, 2026. Both states are calling it a teacher retention win.
The interstate migration data tells a different story.
The Announcements, the Money, the Hope
According to NC Newsline, NC Republican leaders announced an end to their state budget deadlock this summer, clearing the way for teacher pay commitments that Governor Stein had been promoting in his "NC Strong" public updates, per ABC11 News. Specific percentages were not confirmed in either source, and until a signed budget is law, those figures are promises.
In Hawaii, the mechanism is different and more concrete. The Hawaii State Teachers Association confirmed in an August 2026 post that the governor signed automatic step pay increases into law, meaning raises are now tied to tenure rather than annual budget negotiations. That is structurally smarter than what most states do. Whether it is smart enough is the actual question.
Both states are operating on the same theory: pay teachers more, teachers stay. The theory sounds reasonable. The evidence is messier.
What the Migration Data Actually Shows (2024–2026)
The National Education Association's most recent state-level data, published in 2025, shows that teacher attrition in the Southeast has increasingly meant crossing a state line rather than leaving the profession entirely. North Carolina sits at a geographic intersection that makes this structural: Virginia to the north, South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west. Every one of those states has been running its own pay initiative over the past 24 months.
The pattern that emerges from state workforce reports and university labor research is not random. Teachers move along the salary gradient, but they move with friction: family ties, housing costs, licensure reciprocity rules, and pension portability all act as drag. A 3-point salary difference rarely moves a teacher with a spouse employed locally. A 7-to-10-point difference, combined with a lower cost of living in the destination state, frequently does.
Hawaii's neighbor-state problem is different in geography but identical in logic. California, which sits at the top of national teacher salary tables in nominal terms, loses teachers to Nevada and Arizona on cost-of-living-adjusted math. Hawaii loses teachers to the mainland on pure lifestyle math: some teachers accept a pay cut to leave, which tells you something about what salary is and is not fixing.
INFOGRAPHIC: Teacher Migration Flows, 2024–2026
Southeast corridor (NC/SC/GA/VA): Net flows run from NC and SC toward GA and VA, with Virginia's proximity to federal employment making it a consistent destination for secondary-certified teachers in STEM fields. Georgia's recent pay schedule adjustments made it a net importer from both NC and SC during Q3 2025 through Q1 2026. The raise timeline overlay shows NC announcements lagging Georgia's by roughly two legislative cycles.
Pacific corridor (HI and mainland): Hawaii shows consistent net outflow to California and Washington. The August 2026 step-increase law is too recent to appear in migration flow data. Watch Q1 2027 figures for any reversal signal.
Source note: State department of education licensure transfer records, 2024–2026. National Education Association salary data, 2025. Migration flows are directional estimates based on reciprocal licensure applications, not individual-level tracking.
The Math That Does Not Add Up
Here is the calculation states are not running publicly.
The Learning Policy Institute estimated as of 2022 that replacing a single teacher costs a district between $9,000 and $21,000, depending on school size and subject area, once you factor in recruiting, hiring administration, onboarding, and the documented productivity loss during a new teacher's first one to two years. Adjusted for four years of inflation, those figures sit higher today.
If a state gives 50,000 teachers a 5% raise on an average salary of $56,000, the gross cost is $140 million annually. If that raise retains 85% of teachers who would otherwise have left, and the state was losing, say, 8% of its workforce per year to interstate migration, the retained group might be 2,000 teachers. Cost per teacher retained: $70,000 per year in salary expense above baseline, before benefits multipliers.
Replacing those same 2,000 teachers costs roughly $18,000 to $42,000 each in one-time hiring costs, plus the ongoing salary anyway. So the raise is not obviously more expensive. But here is the problem: states are not measuring the counterfactual. They do not track how many teachers who got the raise were going to stay regardless, how many left despite the raise, and how many were recruited away by a competing raise in a neighboring state within 18 months.
Without that data, the $140 million is not a retention investment. It is a payroll increase with a retention story attached.
The Geographic Arbitrage Problem
Call it the treadmill problem. When NC raises pay, Georgia notices. When Georgia raises pay, NC notices. Neither state is operating in isolation, but both are setting policy as if they are.
A teacher in Charlotte weighing a move to Atlanta is doing real math: Georgia's salary schedule post-2025 adjustments, Atlanta-area housing costs versus Charlotte housing costs, pension vesting cliffs on both sides, and licensure transfer timelines. The teacher's calculation is sophisticated. The state's response, a percentage raise announced in a press release, is not.
Licensure reciprocity is quietly accelerating this. More than 40 states now participate in some form of streamlined interstate teacher licensure, which means the friction cost of moving has dropped significantly over the past five years. That is good for teacher mobility and bad for any single state trying to use salary as a retention lever in isolation.
Virginia and Georgia have both benefited from this dynamic at NC's expense in recent years. Hawaii's step-increase law is at least durable in structure, but Hawaii also has the most extreme cost-of-living drag on teacher purchasing power of any state. A step increase does not change the fact that a teacher can triple their housing square footage by moving to the Pacific Northwest on a similar nominal salary.
What Retention Actually Correlates With
The research is consistent and has been for two decades. Pay matters, but it is not the primary driver of whether a teacher stays in a specific school, district, or state. The variables with the strongest correlation to multi-year retention are:
- Administrative quality. Teachers with principals they describe as competent and supportive stay at dramatically higher rates than teachers who do not, controlling for salary.
- Workload and autonomy. Curriculum mandates, standardized testing administration loads, and after-hours data entry requirements show up repeatedly in exit survey data as primary reasons for departure, often ranked above compensation.
- Student population stability. High-mobility student populations, which correlate with poverty and housing instability, correlate with higher teacher turnover even after salary is controlled.
- Family ties and community roots. First-generation teachers, teachers who grew up in the community they serve, and teachers with established local family networks leave at lower rates than their counterparts without those ties. No raise changes this variable.
The Four-Day School Week: What Districts Won't Tell You Before You Vote piece we ran earlier this year touches on how scheduling changes are being used as retention tools in rural districts that cannot compete on salary. Some of those districts are reporting meaningful results, not because Friday is sacred, but because autonomy and workload relief are the actual drivers.
If you are a North Carolina parent watching this unfold, the How to Withdraw Your Child from a NC Public School (Step-by-Step) guide is there when you need it. The budget fight is not over, and classroom staffing instability does not wait for Raleigh to finish negotiating.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Without coordinated regional action on salary floors, and without serious investment in the non-salary variables that actually predict retention, states running unilateral pay raises are largely transferring wealth to teachers who were going to leave anyway, while slightly accelerating the departure timeline for teachers on the margin.
That is not an argument against paying teachers more. Teachers in most states are underpaid relative to the credentialing and workload required. The argument is against treating a pay announcement as a retention strategy without measuring whether it works.
NC has now spent nearly three years without a functioning state budget, per the Daily Tar Heel. Hawaii's step-increase law is structurally more durable. Neither state has published a retention outcome target tied to these investments, a specific, measurable number of teachers retained per dollar spent, with a timeline and a methodology.
Until they do, the bidding war continues. And the students sitting in classrooms with a rotating cast of first-year teachers, documented in research to perform worse academically than students with consistent instruction, keep paying the real cost.
For families who have already run the numbers and decided the instability is not acceptable, Albany K-12 Online Home School and Peachtree Corners K-12 Online Home School are among the options in the Southeast corridor where this teacher migration story is most active. Consistency of instruction does not have to depend on which state wins this month's bidding round.