The $150K Club: Who Gets Paid the Most in Delaware Education

Delaware hides individual state salaries — payroll checks are anonymized in the public checkbook. But the Department of Education publishes something almost as good: average pay by office. And when an office has one person in it, an "average" is a salary. Welcome to the $150K Club.

The $150K Club

The state's "Official/Administrative" category covers superintendents' offices and school administrators, published as averages per organization. Three administrative offices top the list, but the surprise is who else is here: elementary school principals in Christina School District clearing $150,000.

For scale: Delaware's Governor is paid $185,096 by statute. The top of this list is within $20,000 of the Governor — running a vocational district's front office.

The full league table: vo-techs on top, charters on the bottom

Average educator pay across all 44 districts and charters tells a two-story story. The three vocational-technical districts all land in the top 11. Charter schools hold nine of the bottom ten spots — Providence Creek Academy is dead last at $59,744, while its single administrator ranks #2 in the entire state at $164,229. Read that pairing again: highest-paid boss, lowest-paid staff.

Averages blend state, local and federal shares across all staff categories. Full 44-row table on our salaries page.

One department eats 56% of all overtime

Outside education, the checkbook's most striking payroll line is overtime. Delaware paid $79.9 million in overtime in FY2026 — up 42% from $56.0 million in FY2018 — and the Department of Corrections alone took $44.6 million, 56% of the total. Spread across its 2,641 authorized positions, that's $16,887 of overtime per position, per year.

Prisons run 24/7, and overtime is how the state covers shifts it doesn't staff. Whether that's cheaper than hiring more officers — or a sign the hiring is broken — is the annual argument in Dover. The number itself is not in dispute.

The bigger picture: people cost 30 cents of every dollar

State wages hit $3.21 billion in FY2026, up 52% from $2.11 billion in FY2018. Employer-side benefits added another $1.91 billion. Authorized positions grew just 10% over the same stretch, to 35,475. Pay is rising much faster than headcount — the same pattern as the overtime curve, and the same upward pressure on every budget cycle.

Why no names?

Because Delaware doesn't publish them — not in these datasets. Every payroll check in the public checkbook is anonymized into "Employee Compensation" and "Other Employment Costs/Benefits." The educator figures here are official averages by organization (state, local and federal shares combined); one-person offices are the closest thing to an individual salary the state publishes. For per-person records compiled from public sources, third-party republishers like OpenPayrolls exist — we link rather than mirror, because our numbers all come straight from the state.