A household in Newton, where the most experienced teachers earn just over $100,000 a year, must earn at least $183,000 to afford a typical mortgage payment. A first-year teacher in Newton Public Schools can’t even afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment in the city—they’d be about $30,000 short.

These are among the findings of a new report that says Newton teachers can’t afford to live in the city where they work.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan education research and advocacy organization, analyzed teacher pay and housing costs in 72 large urban school districts across the U.S. and found that teachers are being priced out of the communities they serve.

The story is similar in Newton, according to NCTQ findings presented Tuesday night at an event hosted by Newton for Everyone, a housing affordability advocacy group.

From 2020 to 2025, house prices in Newton grew 40% and rent prices grew 20%. The salaries of the city’s first-year teachers grew 19%. For a fifth-year teacher, affordable rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Newton is out of reach. Purchasing a house is a stretch even for teachers of 25 years.

“The big takeaway here is that salary growth is being outpaced by inflation, by home prices and by rental prices,” NCTQ president Heather Peske said while presenting the findings at the Scandinavian Living Center in West Newton. 

Comparing teacher compensation and housing costs is an important metric to determine how districts can retain teachers, Peske said. Teachers who can’t afford to live near their schools are absent more often, less involved in the school community and more likely to leave the school. 

“It’s really hard to attract and retain great teachers when they can’t afford to pay rent or a mortgage in the district where you’re trying to attract them,” Peske, an Arlington resident, said in an interview with The Newton Beacon.

The NCTQ considers housing affordable if it costs 30% or less of one teacher’s salary. A first-year teacher in Newton, who earns between $59,000 and $65,000 per year, spends 46% of their salary on rent for a one-bedroom apartment if they have a bachelor’s degree and 42% if they have a master’s degree.

In fact, a first-year teacher can’t afford rent in any local district, according to the NCTQ’s analysis of seven of Newton’s neighboring school districts: Brookline, Needham, Wellesley, Weston, Waltham, Watertown and Boston. Boston is the fifth least affordable district in the NCTQ’s national analysis.

“I don’t want to live in a city that’s not affordable for my children’s teachers,” said Luke Mann-O’Halloran, a leader of Newton for Everyone. 

Early-career teachers are not the only ones feeling the strain. 

In Newton, teachers with 25 years of experience put roughly half their salaries toward monthly housing payments, with similar numbers across neighboring districts. They earn between $102,000 and $114,000 per year. For a monthly housing payment to be affordable, they’d need to earn $183,000. 

“Can you imagine telling someone who’s starting out at 22 years old, ‘You’re going to be able to have a house, but it’s going to take you into later in your 50s to be able to do that’?” Peske said during the presentation.

When Ari Kenyon-Vance, a guidance counselor at Newton South High School, was 31, she moved in with her parents in Hanover so she could save money to buy a house. Living in Hanover, she said, she routinely woke up at 4:30 a.m., arrived at Newton South at 6:15 a.m. and made it back home at 7:30 p.m. after coaching school sports.

“Affordable housing close to school for teachers isn’t just about convenience,” Kenyon-Vance said at Tuesday’s event. “It’s about also attracting and retaining passionate educators who help our schools thrive.”

This summer Kenyon-Vance and her husband, both educators with master’s degrees, purchased a house in a nearby town. Kenyon-Vance said they would have loved to live in Newton but couldn’t afford it.

Avery Thrush, a Cambridge resident who attended Tuesday’s event, taught in Tennessee for four years until cost-of-living concerns motivated her to leave the classroom and pursue policy work instead.

“I made the decision to leave the teaching profession because of low wages,” said Thrush, now a fellow at Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “I definitely see how this is a problem that pushes teachers out of the profession.”

Adam Towvim, an Auburndale resident who raised two children in the Newton school system, said he wants to see policies that allow teachers to afford housing near their schools.

“It just matters so much that a teacher be able to have more time in their day to focus on the students and less time focused on traffic jams on the highway,” Towvim said.

Increasing teachers’ salaries wouldn’t increase the number of homes available to rent or buy, Peske said, so the key is to create more affordable housing. Solutions include establishing partnerships between school districts and local housing authorities or building affordable housing for educators, such as the Bentonville Teacher Homes project in Arkansas.

Robert Kavanaugh, who taught for 40 years in the Bronx, Sudbury and Belmont, said building affordable housing for educators separates them from the community and creates a stigma about living in designated housing. 

“I don’t need someone to build me special housing as a teacher,” said Kavanaugh, who lives in Newtonville. “I don’t want charity. I want to be paid.”

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This story is part of a partnership between the Newton Beacon and the Boston University Department of Journalism.