Irish school principals can earn up to €112k per year, says report

Irish school principals are some of the best paid across Europe, a new report shows.

Principals here can earn up to €112,000 per year. This puts Ireland in seventh place out of nearly 40 countries for principals' salaries. It also means that the maximum pay for school heads here is over twice what their counterparts in Spain and Germany can earn. Lichenstein, where principals can be paid up to €170,000 per year, took the top spot in the report by the European Commission. Salaries for principals in Luxembourg, meanwhile, can reach up to €153,000 per year while the maximum salary for those in the UK is over €123,000. The head of the Teachers' Union of Ireland has said that the six-figure sum that top principals are paid here is fair for the work they do. "That only applies to an extremely small amount of very large schools and the workload as principal of that is just extraordinary, probably working five nights a week," he told The Irish Examiner. "A lot of principals jobs becoming vacant have to be advertised two or three times to attract applicants to them because of the workload is quite extraordinary for all schools, particularly for larger schools." The report also showed that there's a big gap between what teachers in Ireland start out on and their potential earnings. A teacher's salary can jump by 89 per cent throughout their career, it was found.