Are Teachers Covered by Social Security? It Is Not by State

Updated August 4, 2026. Quick answer: the list of “states where teachers do not get Social Security” that you have read a dozen times is not a list SSA publishes or maintains. Coverage was never decided state by state. It is decided position by position, through agreements a state chose to make on behalf of each individual school district — which is why a teacher and the bus driver in the same building can be on opposite sides of it.

What the rule actually is

State and local employees are brought into Social Security through what is called a Section 218 agreement. Two things about it undo the state-list framing completely:

A Section 218 Agreement is an Agreement between the State and SSA. The State enters into an Agreement with SSA on behalf of each political subdivision within the State that wishes to extend Social Security Coverage to its employees. SSA cannot enter into an Agreement with a political subdivision.

— POMS SL 30001.301 (Social Security Act §218; 20 CFR 404.1200)

Ultimately, it is within the State’s discretion to determine for whom, whether, and when to extend Section 218 coverage, subject to the requirements of the Act.

— POMS SL 30001.301, section C

Read for whom, whether, and when. Coverage is granted to some employees and not others, at different times, district by district. A state is not covered or uncovered; positions are. And the unit SSA works in is the coverage group, defined by the positions inside it:

A retirement system coverage group is a grouping that covers positions that are also covered under a retirement system or public pension. For the coverage group to be a retirement system coverage group, a retirement system or public pension must have covered the positions at the time the coverage group was created.

— POMS SL 30001.320 (§218(d); 20 CFR 404.1205(b), 404.1206(b))

It goes finer still: a distinct tier or plan within one retirement system can count as a separate retirement system for coverage purposes, so long as its money is not comingled with the other tiers. Two teachers in the same system, hired years apart into different tiers, are not necessarily in the same position on this.

The split that proves it: certificated versus everyone else

This is the cleanest evidence that the state list is the wrong model, and it is written into federal law by name:

Section 104(f) of the Social Security Amendments of 1956 authorized Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington to extend Social Security coverage to nonprofessional school employees in positions under a retirement system without a referendum, and as a separate absolute coverage group.

— POMS SL 30001.370, section A

Nine states, named in the statute, were allowed to cover the nonprofessional school staff separately — and the dividing line is exactly the one you would guess:

Nonprofessional school employees are those employees of public school districts in the specified States who were not in positions which State law required a valid State teacher’s or administrator’s certificate as a prerequisite for payment for their services.

— POMS SL 30001.370, section A.1

SSA’s own examples of those positions: janitor, bus driver, cafeteria worker, school nurse, payroll supervisor, counselor, educational aide. So in a Texas or Pennsylvania district, the people who kept the building running could be paying into Social Security while the certificated teachers were not. Same employer, same payroll, opposite answers. No state-level list can express that, which is why no accurate one exists.

The window for using that route closed: modifications had to be entered into before 1 July 1957, extended through 31 December 1961 by Public Law 86-284. After 1961 coverage was obtainable only through the referendum procedures.

How to actually find out, in the order worth doing it

Notice that none of those four steps is “check whether your state is on a list”. If a page hands you that list and stops, it has answered a different question from the one you asked.

What the 2025 repeal did and did not change here

The Social Security Fairness Act removed WEP and GPO for benefits payable for months after December 2023. Both were reductions applied to a Social Security benefit because you also had a pension from non-covered work. Removing them changed what your Social Security benefit is worth. It did not change whether your teaching position is covered — that is the Section 218 question above, and it is untouched. What the Act actually struck is covered in full separately, along with which of the two was cutting your check and what to do if you never filed because of them.

One warning if you are reading across systems. The repeal reached WEP and GPO only. It did not touch other offsets. The railroad dual-benefit reduction in particular is still fully operative and is a different mechanism entirely — that is covered separately.

Related

The claiming side, now that the offsets are gone: coordinating a TRS annuity with Social Security. Your own system’s mechanics — COLA, vesting, buyback, refund: public pension retirement decisions by system. Whether your government job is covered at all, in general terms: is your government job covered. If your earnings record looks wrong: fixing an earnings-record error.

Honest gaps

We cannot tell you whether your own position is covered, and we are not going to guess — the whole finding on this page is that the answer is not knowable from your state. We have not published the 1991 mandatory-coverage rule (state and local employees in neither a Section 218 agreement nor a qualifying retirement system are brought in automatically), because we did not read it at an official source in this pass and we will not paraphrase it from memory. We have not read the Section 218 agreement of any individual state; those sit with each state’s Social Security Administrator. www.ssa.gov returns an error to us and we re-tested it today; everything quoted above comes from SSA’s Program Operations Manual System at secure.ssa.gov.

General information drawn from the Social Security Act, title 20 of the Code of Federal Regulations and SSA’s own Program Operations Manual System, not legal or benefits advice. Coverage turns on a position and an agreement this page cannot see. We sell nothing on this page and earn nothing from it.