The whole of EduHire is built around one number — five kilometres — so it is worth explaining why we think it is the number that matters more than salary for most of the teachers we place.
The arithmetic nobody does
Take a nursery teacher earning ₹20,000 a month at a school 14 km away. Two auto or bus legs a day, six days a week, is somewhere between ₹3,000 and ₹5,000 a month before anything goes wrong. That is fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the salary, spent on getting to the salary.
Then there is the time. Ninety minutes a day, six days a week, is roughly thirty-six hours a month — about a week of waking life, every month, spent in traffic. Priced at the same hourly rate the job pays, that is another ₹3,000 of unpaid work.
A job at ₹18,000 fifteen minutes from home is, in practice, better paid than a job at ₹22,000 across the city. This is not a lifestyle preference. It is the actual number.
The part that does not show up in the arithmetic
- Preschool days start early. An 8:30 a.m. start 14 km away in Bengaluru means leaving at 7, which means a 5:30 morning if you have your own children to organise first.
- You arrive already tired. Small children are relentless and 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 a teacher 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.
On EduHire every role is measured from where you live and sorted by that distance, so this comparison is the first thing you see rather than something you have to work out afterwards.