Georgia House Bill HB631

Georgia 2025-2026 Regular Session

• Introduced: 2/26/25

Caption

Education; require minimum base salary for certified professional personnel with bachelor's degrees be based upon national average living wage

Summary

HB631 would amend Georgia’s teacher salary law to tie the minimum base salary for certificated professional personnel with bachelor’s degrees and no experience to a “national average living wage” determined by the State Board of Education. The bill directs the board to calculate that wage using research-based data from at least three nationally recognized authorities and to publish the calculation and methodology on the Department of Education’s website at least once every three years, beginning in 2026. The bill also sets an effective date of July 1, 2025. The measure preserves the existing salary schedule structure for teachers, administrators, and other certificated personnel, including placement based on certificate level and years of creditable experience, while retaining provisions that deny experience credit for certain unsatisfactory or ineffective evaluations. It also keeps the current rule that leadership degrees generally do not affect salary placement unless the educator is serving in a leadership position, subject to existing grandfathering exceptions. In practice, the bill would require the state to establish and fund a minimum salary floor for entry-level certificated staff that is benchmarked to a living-wage standard rather than a fixed statutory dollar amount.

Impact

HB631 would change Code Section 20-2-212, Georgia’s statute governing minimum salary schedules for certificated education personnel, by replacing the current base-salary framework for bachelor’s-degree holders with a living-wage benchmark set by the State Board of Education. It would require annual legislative appropriations sufficient to implement the salary schedule and would obligate local school systems to pay at least the state minimum salary schedule for full-time and pro rata for part-time certificated employees. The bill would also add a recurring reporting and publication requirement for the board’s wage calculation, increasing transparency and potentially influencing future education funding decisions.

Sentiment

Based on the bill text and the absence of recorded committee debate or votes in the provided materials, the measure appears to be framed as a pro-education, pro-teacher-pay proposal aimed at improving compensation for entry-level certificated personnel. The caption and structure suggest support for aligning teacher pay with a living-wage standard, which is generally likely to be viewed favorably by educators and advocates for school staffing and recruitment. No contrary sentiment is documented in the supplied record, but the bill’s reliance on state appropriations implies that fiscal concerns could be a likely area of scrutiny.

Contention

The main points of potential contention are likely to be fiscal and methodological. First, the bill requires the General Assembly to appropriate funds annually to support the salary schedule, which could raise concerns about state budget impact and local implementation costs. Second, the State Board of Education would be responsible for determining the “national average living wage” using data from at least three national authorities, which could prompt debate over which data sources are used, how the calculation is made, and whether a national benchmark appropriately reflects Georgia labor-market conditions. A further issue is that the bill preserves existing performance-based limits on experience credit and leadership-degree salary placement, which may be viewed by some as a necessary accountability measure and by others as limiting compensation growth.