Teachers' pay in Cameroon: salary scale, allowances and demands

What the scale says

Base pay follows the index for each category and step. Teachers' grade and step promotions come every two years and are automated, according to Cameroon Tribune (October 2026). The full scale by category and step is annexed to Presidential Decree No. 2024/057 of 21 February 2024; it is only distributed as a scanned image, and no official source publishes a table for each teaching grade.

As another benchmark, the tax website Lefisk puts category A2 (the PLEG category) between index points 430 and 1,140, or roughly 216,000 to 386,000 CFA francs gross a month in 2024. In 2017 a teacher interviewed by Camer.be said he was expecting a salary of 226,000 CFA francs. For primary teachers (B1 and B2), we found no figure published by an identifiable source.

Allowances

The allowances specific to national education staff are set by Decree No. 2002/040 of 24 February 2002. It distinguishes a technical allowance, a teaching allowance and an assessment allowance, varying by category (A, B, C, D) and function; they can be combined, are paid monthly and form part of salary (Cameroon Tribune, October 2026). Some posts also carry documentation, teaching-research or suggestion allowances.

At university, lecturers also receive a special allowance for the modernisation of research, paid quarterly. Delays in paying it are the main cause of strikes by the SYNES union: a general strike from 16 October 2024, extended to all eleven state universities on 6 January 2025, a new strike from 5 January 2026 (Le Jour), and the strike call maintained in September 2026. According to RFI (24 September 2026), the union was demanding full payment for the second quarter of 2026 to the 8,200 lecturers concerned and settlement of a 10 billion CFA franc “academic debt” built up over twenty years.

Does pay depend on where you work?

As far as we could verify, no: base pay and the Decree 2002/040 allowances depend on grade and step, not on posting. We found no published text creating a hardship or remote-area allowance for teachers, including in the Far North. A 2006 thesis on teacher management specifically proposed adding “a compensatory allowance” for difficult areas, and in 2022 teachers were still demanding, among other things, new allowances for water, electricity and transport in rural areas (Cameroon Tribune).

The 2023 and 2024 rises

These rises apply to all public employees, not teachers specifically. We found no new general increase announced for 2025 or 2026. The state wage bill reached 1,753.5 billion CFA francs in 2025 (+15.1%), which the government mainly attributes to promotions being automated through the AIGLES system; the 2026 budget plans for 1,626.2 billion (EcoMatin).

OTS and the “teachers' debt”

In February 2022 the “On a trop supporté” (OTS, “We've put up with too much”) collective launched a “dead chalk” action: teachers turned up at school but did not teach. They demanded immediate payment of arrears estimated at 181 billion CFA francs (promotion back pay, family allowances, bonuses), a teachers' statute and higher pay. On 9 March 2022 the head of state ordered a set of measures: salary top-ups from March 2022 for those paid only two-thirds, settlement of housing-allowance arrears from May, and staggered payment of promotion arrears from June (Cameroon Tribune, Journal du Cameroun).

OTS called another strike from 22 to 25 April 2025, demanding “a dignified status for Cameroonian teachers”, full payment of the arrears and a national education forum, while acknowledging the government's efforts (Journal du Cameroun). We found no document confirming that the remaining arrears were fully paid by the December 2025 deadline.

Contract, hourly-paid and private teachers

Contract primary teachers are paid on a different scale from civil servants; in 2016 their union Snicomp denounced “huge gaps” in pay without publishing figures. Hourly-paid secondary teachers are paid by the hour: a history teacher in Maroua quoted by Camer.be in 2017 earned 400 CFA francs an hour. In private schools, secular or faith-based, no common pay scale is published online; a Camer.be article from August 2026 claims some primary teachers earn 30,000 to 50,000 CFA francs a month, without giving the source of those figures.

For university staff, the same Camer.be article (August 2026) gives a monthly salary of 500,000 CFA francs for a full professor and 440,000 and 370,000 CFA francs for the next two grades, which would put Cameroon far behind Senegal (2,000,000 CFA francs). No official source corroborates these figures.

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