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Forced to be the first cab off the ranks, staff at one inner-city Brisbane school have negotiated base salaries as high as $140,000.
One of Brisbane’s most prestigious schools has inked a new pay deal for teachers, as Queensland’s private institutions set the state standard for teachers’ wages.
Among the first Brisbane private schools to negotiate new deals was Brisbane Grammar School, which sent a new agreement to the Fair Work Commission for final approvals in mid-September. It would pay senior teaching staff as much as $140,000 by January next year, which Independent Education Union Queensland branch secretary Terry Burke said would match Brisbane Girls Grammar School salaries.
Brisbane Grammar School is expected to finalise a new wage deal that would boost the upper limit on base salaries to $140,000.
“They saw the school over the other side of the lane, getting particular rates and thought that as a staff they should be getting paid those rates too,” Burke said. In its 2025 annual report, the school recorded almost $50 million in employee expenses for 338 staff, including part-time and casual workers.latest Commonwealth data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency showed the average wage for all staff across almost 40 eligible Brisbane private secondary schools sat at about $117,000 in the 2024-25 financial year.
This number, which included non-teaching staff, increased from the previous year by about $4000 across all Brisbane private schools. Among the schools with the highest averages on its list was Anglican Church Grammar School , which paid teaching and non-teaching staff an average of $149,000 across the 2024-25 financial year.
However, in 2026, the highest base salary for a teacher sat at $130,996, although teachers with additional qualifications, such as highly accomplished and lead teachers, could add another $16,000. Burke said across private institutions, independent-sector schools had an “energetic promotion” of staff to specialised roles, such as highly accomplished and lead teacher roles, which come with a several-thousand-dollar bonus. Catholic schools, he said, were generally employing more graduate teachers, driving down salary average figures.
“Even more so, the pattern of doing internships in the last year of the four-year degree – that continues to rise,” Burke said. At the lower end of the figures, Brisbane Adventist College and Brisbane Boys’ College paid staff, on average, less than $100,000.
However, BBC’s current wage deal stipulated the school would pay its non-specialised teachers a base salary of up to $131,000 this year. Burke said the state’s public sector generally set the precedent for teachers’ pay, and private schools were “the next cab off the ranks”. The union was instead fronting arbitration in April next year, leaving the private sector to eke out its own pay deals ahead of public school teachers, Burke said.
The Education Department told this masthead the current average for state school teachers – falling in the 2026-27 financial year – was about $117,000. These included six agreements with Queensland’s five dioceses, and one covering religious institute schools – a group which includes St Joseph’s College Gregory Terrace , Marist College Ashgrove and All Hallows’ School.
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