Pricing the strike

Are published figures on the cost of the UESF contract and the strike itself credible?

EDIT (2/25/2026): On 2/24, Superintendent Su sent an announcement to the SFUSD community that provided a breakdown of the $183M cost estimate, clarifying that it includes projected expenses over 3 years, so the two years of the contract and the following year (2027-2028).

This is a short post to examine two numbers that have been repeated in multiple outlets since the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) signed a tentative agreement with SFUSD ten days ago, ending a four-day strike.

Did SFUSD lose 7 to 10 million a day?

State funding for California school districts is proportional to average daily attendance (ADA), or student-days of attendance, rather than enrollment. This is the main reason why the district would lose revenue for each day of strike, but it cannot add up to $7-10 million a day for SFUSD. Multiplying that range by the number of instruction days (180) yields a total of $1.26-1.8 billion. The lower end is close to SFUSD’s total budget, but not all of that budget is composed of state attendance-based funding. SFUSD’s adopted 2025-2026 budget planned for $648 million in revenue from the state’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The December 2025 interim report mentions $744 million in unrestricted revenue, the large majority of which would be attendance-based LCFF funding. The $648-744 million range gives a daily value of $3.6-4.1 million a day.

A separate source for the $4 million / day figure is a SFUSD press release from a campaign to boost student attendance. In 2024-2025, SFUSD lost $60 million in state funding from 4.4 million hours of student absenteeism. 4.4 million hours is about the equivalent of 15 six-hour school days for each of the 49,000 SFUSD students. Therefore, one day of absence for all students would cost around $4 million.¹

There are a few ways in which the actual cost could differ from the average cost of one day of absenteeism for all students:

• The state penalty for districts not offering the minimum 180 instructional days is the “sum of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) apportionment for affected grade level average daily attendance (ADA) times .0056 times the number of days short, up to five days”. The .0056 value is around 1/180, so this is consistent with SFUSD losing a day of funding at their average attendance rate. Another interpretation is that the state penalizes a district for schools being closed that day in addition to counting students absent, effectively removing 2 days of funding per day of strike. This appears unlikely, but it would be one way to explain the $7 to 10 million figure that amounts to around double the state funding for one day.

• On the expenses side, a large part of the $4 million in daily state revenue is used to pay UESF members, but they don’t need to be paid while on a work stoppage. This suggests an actual budget impact less than the loss of revenue, because expenses are going down as well. It is possible that SFUSD and UESF would negotiate a way for the district to add instructional days and for the teachers to get paid, which would negate some of the impact of the strike on all sides (revenues, expenses, and of course loss of instruction time).

• Finally, the district might be counting new expenses linked with managing the strike as part of that figure.

All in all, the reason why the $7 to 10 million a day figure seems implausible is that it would require a scenario where either the state double-penalizes the district for those days and the district’s expenses remain constant (even if all schools are closed and most employees are on a work stoppage), or they lose a day of state funding but somehow incur expenses equal to two days just from the extra costs of managing the strike.

Does the new contract cost 183 million?

The tentative two-year agreement² has been described as a $183 million deal. By far the two largest monetary components are wage increases and employer coverage of dependent healthcare costs. Yet, the cost estimates for those two items in the pre-strike fact-finding report would lead to an estimate much lower than $183 million.

On the question of wages, the fact-finding report states that a 4% increase over two-years would cost around $10 million per 1% increase for all employees. We can do a quick sanity check of that number. UESF represents around 6500 employees. If the average employee made $100,000 a year, a 2% increase on year 1 and a 4% increase on year 2 would result in around $6,000 over the course of two years per employee, quite close to a $40 million total given the very coarse estimates we are using. Thus, it is reasonable to expect a 6% increase staggered over two years to cost around $60 million. The actual agreement gives a 5% raise for certificated staff (e.g., teachers) and a 8.5% raise for classified staff (e.g., paraeducators). Given that most UESF members are certificated and that their wages are likely higher on average than the classified staff, the net effect is probably similar to, or maybe less than, a 6% raise for all.

As for dependent healthcare, the fact-finding report estimated the UESF’s ask for full employer funding at the Kaiser plan rate to cost $14 million per year. UESF indicated that some members pay up to $1,500/month ($18,000/year) for dependent care. The $14 million value would be equal to those annual costs for close to 800 employees or around 12% of the UESF membership. This could represent the value for members currently enrolled in a family health plan. In that case, the true cost would be higher if more members with dependents currently enrolled in a spouse’s plan switch to the UESF plan after the deal.

However, the tentative agreement does not cover those healthcare costs for the full two years of the agreement. It covers 50% of the cost starting in July 2026 (1 year in) and 100% of the cost starting in January 2027 (1.5 years in). So the actual cost for the duration of the agreement would be closer to 3/4 of a year of premiums (so up to $13,500) for members with dependents. This is about $10-11 million at current participation rates and less than $50 million even if participation would somehow extend to half the membership.

Of course, the terms agreed upon will lead to gains for the union and costs for the district beyond the two-year term, so maybe some of those costs (with a discount rate?) are included in the $183 million value. There might also be enough flexibility in how to define the “value” of a new contract, allowing the parties to use a generous definition when they want to emphasize the scope of the deal. That said, it is hard to see how the agreement could incur $183 million in additional net expenses for SFUSD over its two-year term. To support the idea that the deal has a modest impact on the 2026-2027 budget, we could note that SFUSD has requested the Board of Education to approve 42 layoff notices for next year, compared to hundreds in the previous years. Preliminary layoff notices usually represent the maximum amount of layoffs the district would consider to balance next year’s budget.

1. A more precise estimate would be a bit less than a day of absenteeism for all students, since about 1 in 12 students (15/180) are absent on an average day when schools are open.

2. It is retroactive, so year 1 of the agreement is the current (2025-2026) school year and year 2 is next school year (2026-2027).