82,000 licenses are not 82,000 teachers

By Amy Traylor, Editor & Publisher · October 7, 2026

There is a tempting number in New Mexico's education data. The state holds about 82,000 current education licenses and employs about 40,000 people in its public schools. Subtract, and you get a headline: 42,000 licensed teachers sitting on the sidelines. It is a real gap. It is also mostly not what it looks like — and seeing why is the whole point of reading the data instead of the difference.

First, most licenses aren't classroom licenses

Of the 82,266 people holding a current New Mexico education license, only 45,697 hold a classroom-teacher license. The other 36,569 are administrator and support-provider credentials — principals, counselors, diagnosticians, speech-language pathologists, and the like. Many of those people are working in schools right now, just not as classroom teachers. So the honest denominator for “teachers” isn't 82,000; it's closer to 46,000.

New Mexico education licenses by type and employment, 2024–25. Source: NM PED licensure and staffing records.

Employed in a NM public school Not employed

Measured properly, the deployment rate is healthier than the raw figure suggests: of the 45,697 classroom-teacher licenses, 25,953 — about 57% — belong to someone employed in a New Mexico public school.

So who are the 42,000 not working here?

Break the non-employed group into categories it can actually be sorted into, and the “missing teachers” story shrinks to its real size.

The 42,118 license holders not employed in a New Mexico public school, by category. Source: NM PED licensure matched to 2016–2023 assignment records.

The two largest groups — about 21,300 holding only an administrator or support credential, and about 10,700 teacher-license holders — have no New Mexico public-school teaching assignment on record from 2016 through 2023. That group is mostly not lapsed classroom teachers at all: it is out-of-state license holders carried on New Mexico's rolls through reciprocity, private- and tribal-school staff, people licensed here who never taught here, and non-teaching credentials. Add roughly 1,400 holders of non-expiring lifetime licenses — overwhelmingly long-retired veterans.

The group that actually fits the “we trained them and lost them” description is the last one: 8,706 people who taught in a New Mexico public school between 2016 and 2023, still hold a license, and aren't employed here now. About 4,400 of them were still teaching within the last two years. That — not 42,000 — is the recruitable pool of recently departed New Mexico teachers.

Why the honest number is smaller, and still matters. A license roll is not a workforce: it accumulates everyone a state ever credentialed, plus everyone it recognizes from elsewhere, minus almost no one. The useful question isn't how many licenses exist; it's how many recently active New Mexico teachers could be brought back — and that answer, about 8,700, is both smaller than the scary headline and more actionable than it.

Why it matters

Policy aimed at a phantom 42,000 — or at “producing” licenses the state already has in abundance — misses the leverage. The real, reachable pool is the several thousand experienced teachers who left recently and are still credentialed. Knowing the difference between a license roll and a teaching workforce is the first step to a retention strategy that targets people who actually exist.

Figures are aggregate counts from New Mexico Public Education Department licensure and staffing records, compiled by the Impact Lab. Teaching-history figures cover 2016–2023. No individual is named or published. See the teacher workforce data page and the companion piece, New Mexico trains teachers it doesn't keep. Provided as-is; the official PED record governs.

— Amy Traylor, Editor & Publisher, New Mexico Impact Lab