JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Working for free two months out of the year doesn’t seem like something that would be asked, but that’s exactly what four area school districts expect from their head football coaches each summer.
Columbia, Duval, Nassau, and St. Johns counties are among the local school districts that pay their head football coaches on the standard 10-month teaching contracts.
Recommended Videos
That means two months of working for free in the summer is the expectation.
News4JAX has been detailing the issues with high school coaching pay for more than a decade, and there has been progress in the state legislature this year on addressing the low pay for extracurricular supervisors like coaches.
Senate Bill 538 passed unanimously, while House Bill 731 has sailed through committee after committee. There’s optimism from both chambers that the bills will make it to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk for his signature next month.
Head football teaching contract lengths
| District | Supplement | Contract length |
|---|---|---|
| Nassau | $7,217 | 10 months |
| Bradford | $7,000 | 12 months |
| Clay | $6,752 | 11 months |
| Union | $6,318 | 12 months |
| St. Johns | $5,650 | 10 months |
| Duval | $4,699 | 10 months |
| Columbia | $4,616 | 10 months |
| Flagler | $4,500 | 11 months |
| Baker | $4,350 | 11 months |
| Suwannee | $4,345 | 12 months |
| Putnam | $3,809 | 12 months |
Those bills would permit extracurricular supervisors like coaches to ask superintendents for more money than their supplemental pay, and also for third-party pay from booster clubs to be allowed.
It’s an inopportune time for public school districts to have to come up with more money for anything, let alone extracurricular leaders. Districts are losing funding by the millions as students opt for different school paths, like charter or virtual school learning.
But the legislature has the booster club option as a fallback funding source, a far more likely one for districts that are in the red.
What the bill doesn’t address is another thorny topic of coaching pay: the teaching contract element.
Head football coaches receive a supplement for their work in that field. Those range from a low of $3,809 in Putnam County to a high of $7,217 in Nassau County. That pay only covers the fall and spring seasons.
But what about the offseason when recruiting trips are going strong and the weight rooms are open daily?
Depends on where coaches work.
In the News4JAX 11-county coverage region, four school districts (Columbia, Duval, Nassau, St. Johns) pay high school football head coaches on standard 10-month contracts. Three (Baker, Clay, Flagler) stretch those teaching contracts to 11 months. The outliers (Bradford, Putnam, Suwannee, Union) have their high school football head coaches on 12-month contracts.
RELATED
Wait, districts expect coaches to work for free in the summer?
Yes, seven of them do.
Football coaching has become a year-round job, and some districts have recognized that challenge. In order to address the demands of the profession, seven area districts have moved head coaches off the standard 10-month teaching contracts that run from August to May and added one or two months to them.
Those extra days are based on the current teacher contract that they’re on, so that can be a significant amount of pay for June and July.
While Columbia, Nassau and St. Johns have raised their coaching supplemental pay over the past 10 years, head football coaches there are still on 10-month contracts.
That means when the weight rooms are open in June and July, or coaches are traveling for camps, they’re doing it for no paycheck.
Columbia, Nassau, and St. Johns have at least done something to address low coach pay in the last decade.
Duval hits the trifecta of failure for head coaches — no supplemental raise in more than 25 years, no pay for playoffs, and 10-month contracts.
The district has been a coaching turnstile. Only four of the district’s 17 head coaches have been with their programs five years or longer.
A county like St. Johns does allow coaches there to make money from running camps in the summer through their LLC businesses, but coaches still have to rent the facilities from the county, and those prices aren’t cheap.
How do coaching salaries work?
People tend to make the comparison of what head coaches in Florida make to what their counterparts in Georgia earn. So when a headline pops up showing that Carrollton head football coach Joey King, Trevor Lawrence’s former coach at Cartersville, is pulling in more than $200,000 (he made $231,755.74 in 2025, according to the Open Georgia transparency website), it can be misleading.
King, like almost every football head coach, is a high school teacher and has an accompanying teacher’s contract.
Those are typically 10-month contracts. That’s just one aspect of his $231,000 salary.
There are two additional months added on at the rate of the teaching contract. Then, the football coaching supplement is added on top of the teaching contract. That’s three essential pieces of the coaching paycheck in Georgia.
The big differences between the Peach and Sunshine states
Those three elements are the same in Florida with a few notable exceptions. The number of classes head coaches in Georgia teach compared to that of Florida is a major difference.
In data from a 2019 story News4JAX did on salary discrepancies between the states, the 13 closest Georgia counties to our area saw head football coaches teaching between zero and three classes.
The lowest among those counties was Effingham, which paid a $9,500 supplement but added 40 teaching contract days. And those contract days can be massive in terms of pay.
Locally, it’s common to see head coaches teaching a minimum of five classes or more per day.
So, let’s look at the average teacher salary in Florida, using the most recent numbers from the National Education Association.
If a head football coach in Duval County earns that average ($54,875) and then adds the coaching supplement on top of that ($4,699), their total pay for the year lands at $59,574.
The average teacher salary in Georgia is $67,641. The two head football coaches in Glynn County earn a $20,000 supplement and two additional months of pay based on their teaching contract.
Using the NEA average, that teaching component contract alone jumps to 81,133 in Glynn County, and the football supplement bumps that total pay to more than $100,000.
That’s how those numbers in Georgia rise so rapidly compared to coaches in Florida.