The whole of EduJobs is built around one number — a few kilometres — so it is worth explaining why we think it matters more than salary for most of the teachers we place.
The arithmetic nobody does
Put your own numbers in
₹4,056
fares a month
47 hours
in traffic a month
₹4,533
that time, at your own hourly rate
Effectively 57% of the salary on the advert
Assumes 26 working days, ₹6.5 per km round trip, 54 minutes each way, and an eight-hour day for the hourly rate.
Two things come out of that calculator. The fare is the obvious one and the smaller one. The hours are the expensive part: a long commute takes a working week out of every month and pays nothing for it, which is why two offers that look a thousand rupees apart can be nothing alike.
The part that does not show up in the arithmetic
- Preschool days start early. An 8:30 start fourteen kilometres away in Bengaluru means leaving at seven, which means a 5:30 morning if you have your own children to organise first.
- You arrive already tired. Small children read your mood before you have said anything. The commute is spent before the day begins.
- It is fragile. One flooded underpass, one bus that does not come, and you are the teacher who is late again — through no fault of your own.
- It ends careers. The most common reason we hear for leaving the profession entirely is not the pay and not the children. It is the travel.
What schools get out of it
This is not only in the teacher’s interest, which is why schools go along with it. A teacher who lives nearby is on time, is available at short notice when a colleague is unwell, and is far less likely to resign in November. Preschool hiring is expensive precisely because it repeats, and proximity is the cheapest retention measure available.
We stopped interviewing candidates from more than about forty minutes away. Not because they were worse — because we kept losing them by the second term.
How to use this when you are job hunting
Work out your real hourly rate, including travel time and travel cost, before you compare two offers. Ask about the actual end-of-day time rather than the official one. And when a recruiter shows you a role that pays two thousand more but sits an hour away, you now know what to subtract.
