What English teachers earn in the Dominican Republic
The honest answer is that nobody knows, and that is not an accident. Here is what is known, how to work out your own number, and what to ask before you accept an offer.
Reviewed October 11, 2026
Why this is so hard to find out
Job ads here almost never state pay. Ask a colleague and the subject changes. There is no public survey, no union scale, and no government figure for English teaching specifically. The practical effect is that every teacher negotiates alone, with no idea whether the number on the table is generous or insulting, while the school on the other side of the desk knows exactly what it pays everyone else.
That asymmetry is the whole reason this site exists, and the reason every job posted on ELTPros has to state what it pays, even if only as a range.
What we can tell you today
Not a range, yet. Saying otherwise would mean making one up, and a made-up number is worse than no number: you would take it into a negotiation and it would be wrong.
What is collectable is being collected. The salary survey is open now, and it asks the questions that actually determine pay here: the type of institution, the province, the contract, weekly contact hours, monthly or hourly pay, benefits, years teaching, certifications and English level. When a group has at least eight responses, this page gets its median and its range. Groups smaller than that stay blank, because a median of three people is just three people.
What the report will contain
- Median and range by type of institution: bilingual schools, private and public schools, English institutes, language academies, universities, companies and call centers, and independent teaching.
- Median and range by years of experience.
- How pay differs between a monthly contract and hourly work, once hourly work is converted to a comparable monthly figure.
- Which benefits are common and which are rare.
- How long teachers go between raises, which is the number we expect to be the most uncomfortable.
The report goes to the people who fill out the survey. It is not sent to any school, and no individual figure appears in it.
Work out your own real hourly rate first
Before you can tell whether an offer is good, you need to know what you are earning now per hour of your actual life. Most teachers compute this against contact hours only, which flatters the number and hides the problem.
Add up the hours you genuinely spend: time in front of students, plus planning, grading, parent meetings, staff meetings, report cards and exam weeks. Then divide your monthly pay by all of it.
A worked example
The numbers below are invented to show the arithmetic. They are not market data and should not be used as a reference point.
- Monthly pay
- RD$40,000
- Contact hours a week
- 25
- Planning, grading and meetings a week
- 8
- Rate on contact hours only
- RD$370 an hour
- Rate on all hours worked
- RD$280 an hour
Same job, same pay, and the second figure is the true one. Run this on your current position before you run it on an offer, so you are comparing the same thing twice.
Two adjustments worth making before you compare anything:
- Count thirteen months, not twelve. Christmas salary is a legal right, not a bonus, so your real annual pay is thirteen times the monthly figure. Multiply the monthly by 13 and divide by 12 to get a comparable monthly number. How it is calculated.
- Price the benefits. Health insurance, transport, paid training and books all have a cash value, and a lower salary with health coverage can beat a higher one without it. Ask what each one is worth per month rather than accepting it as a vague extra.
Comparing a monthly offer with hourly work
Hourly work looks better per hour and is usually worse per year. An hourly rate pays nothing for the weeks a school is closed, nothing for preparation unless the contract says so, and it rarely comes with social security enrollment, which means no pension accruing and no health coverage through the job.
To compare the two honestly, multiply the hourly rate by the hours you are actually guaranteed, then by the number of weeks the school is really open, and divide by twelve. That last part is where the difference usually appears: a school year is not fifty-two weeks.
What to ask before you accept
A coordinator who answers these plainly is telling you something good about the school. One who gets uncomfortable is also telling you something.
- What is the pay, as a figure or a range, and is it monthly or hourly?
- How many contact hours a week, and is that guaranteed or does it vary by enrollment?
- Is planning, grading, or meeting time paid, or is the figure for contact hours only?
- Am I being enrolled in social security, and from what date?
- What happens to my pay during exam weeks, holidays and the summer?
- Who pays for books and materials?
- When was the last raise given to someone in this role, and on what basis are raises decided?
- Is there a written contract, and can I read it before I decide?
Asking what the last raise was is the question people skip and the one that predicts the most. A school that cannot answer it has probably not given one.
What we still do not know
Stating this plainly because the gaps are the reason to fill out the survey. We do not yet know how much a bilingual school pays over a language institute, whether certifications translate into money here or only into getting hired, what the ceiling looks like for an experienced teacher, or how far pay in Santiago and the tourist provinces sits from Santo Domingo.
Every one of those is answerable with enough responses, and unanswerable without them.
Three minutes, and you get the report
No account needed, no name asked for. Your email is used to send you the report and nothing else, and no school ever sees your answers.