NC teachers say they don’t have enough time. Here’s how much unpaid work they do
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Survey shows North Carolina teachers averaged 9.3 additional unpaid hours weekly in 2026.
- More than 102,000 educators completed the 2026 Teacher Working Conditions Survey.
- State report recommends protecting teachers’ planning time for planning and collaboration.
North Carolina teachers are complaining that they’re working on nights and weekends because they don’t have enough time during the school day to do their jobs.
Preliminary results from the 2026 North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey show that teachers reported spending an average of 9.3 hours per week on school-related work outside of regular school hours. Teachers aren’t paid extra for working outside school hours.
“When we are asking for time, we are asking for time that we are paid for because our academic results are showing teachers are making the time,” 2023 North Carolina Teacher of the Year Kimberly Jones said at Wednesday’s State Board of Education meeting. “They are sacrificing the time from their own lives. So we’re asking for more compensated time to do the work.”
The State Board of Education reviewed the working conditions survey less than a week after thousands of teachers marched in Raleigh calling for higher pay and more school funding.
Teachers say their time being hijacked
Every two years, the state surveys teachers in traditional public schools and charter schools about conditions in their schools. More than 102,000 educators filled out the anonymous survey earlier this year.
North Carolina teachers are typically under contract to work an 8-hour day. That time includes what’s supposed to be a protected planning period for teachers to do things such as lesson planning and grading student work.
“As a teacher with 17 years of experience, I continue to spend a significant amount of time outside of the school day planning, grading, and preparing instruction,” a teacher said in an anonymous comment included in the state report. “Despite my experience, the demands of teaching a tested subject create ongoing pressure and stress that extend well beyond contract hours. This workload is exhausting and impacts long-term sustainability in the profession.”
Many teachers, particularly at the elementary school level, complained about losing their planning time because the’y’re needed to fill in for other teachers or to attend meetings.
“Let teachers teach, we don’t need more meetings, we need more time to do our job,” another teacher said in the survey comments. “Not having equal pay or even a budget is unacceptable. Hijacking teachers every moment without students to give them more tasks to complete while also stealing their time is unacceptable and causing extreme burnout.”
Schools urged to protect teachers’ time
The report from the state Department of Public Instruction recommends that schools find ways to protect teachers’ time. DPI said protecting the time will give teachers more time to plan, collaborate, observe peers, communicate with families, and manage core professional responsibilities.
“Schools and districts should not only provide time, but protect it for planning, collaboration, and job-embedded professional learning,” DPI said in the report.
Jones said providing the time will prevent so much of the unpaid labor that teachers are performing at home and on weekends.
“Our teachers need that time to collaborate,” said Jones, an advisor to the state board and a Chapel Hill-Carrboro English teacher. “They need that time simply away from students to work on other things. It prevents so much of the amount of unpaid labor that’s happening at home and on weekends.”
