After more than a year of delays, North Carolina finally has a comprehensive state budget. The legislation includes meaningful investments in educator compensation and student supports while continuing broader tax and education policies that will shape public schools for years to come.
The Public School Forum released a comprehensive analysis of the more than 600-page budget, highlighting several key policy themes:
- While the budget offers substantial teacher pay raises for beginning teachers, it leaves longstanding concerns about career longevity unresolved. North Carolina’s new salary schedule strengthens recruitment, but the continued mid-career pay plateau means experienced educators receive comparatively smaller gains. A strong educator workforce depends not only on attracting new teachers, but also on creating incentives for experienced teachers to remain in the profession. Veteran teachers are essential to mentoring new educators, strengthening school communities, and supporting student success.
- The budget makes meaningful investments in student well-being while introducing new policy changes that raise implementation and accountability questions. As youth mental health needs continue to rise, expanding supports in schools is an important step forward. At the same time, repealing the state’s required reporting on school counselors, psychologists, and social workers will make it more difficult to monitor whether schools have the staffing necessary to meet those growing needs.
- Tax policy, combined with constitutional amendments heading to the November ballot, threaten the long-term revenue needed to fund public education. The budget includes scheduled reductions to the personal and corporate income tax rates, with annual revenue losses projected to grow from roughly $900 million in 2027 to more than $8 billion by 2034. According to the Office of State Budget and Management, these tax policies also contribute to a structural budget shortfall beginning at $1.1 billion in 2028 and growing to $4.2 billion by 2034, raising questions about the state’s long-term ability to sustain investments in education and other public services. At the same time, proposed constitutional limits on local property taxes could further reduce the flexibility counties rely on to support public schools and other community needs.
The budget represents compromise, and with compromise comes tradeoffs. While it provides much-needed investments, it also leaves unresolved questions about educator retention, sustainable school funding, continued expansion of private school choice, and new policies affecting the role of public schools, including released time for religious instruction. As implementation begins, those policy choices will be just as important to monitor as the budget itself.
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