Arkansas School Counselor
Arkansas school counselors work with students from kindergarten through 12th grade. The state projects about 200 job openings a year from 2024 to 2034, and the median salary was $59,770 in May 2025. You’ll need graduate study in school counseling and a Guidance/Counseling (K-12) license, either as a first license or added to an educator license. Two CACREP-accredited programs offer the degree.
Arkansas Links
School counseling in Arkansas is a master’s-level job, and state rules protect most of a counselor’s time on student contact days for work with students. Here’s what the job looks like, what it pays, and where in the state you can earn the degree.
What School Counselors Do in Arkansas
When a student at a Little Rock middle school starts skipping class after a rough stretch at home, the teacher doesn’t always catch it first. Sometimes it’s the school counselor, who notices the pattern, calls home, works with the family, and figures out what support the student actually needs to get back on track. That’s one afternoon in the life of an Arkansas school counselor. The morning might have looked completely different.
Every Arkansas district must run a school counseling program built on the four parts outlined in the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) rules: foundation, management, delivery, and accountability. Those programs must use state-recognized and nationally recognized frameworks, and the national one you’ll hear about most is the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) National Model. It organizes the work around three areas: academic, career, and social-emotional development.
Day to day, that splits into direct services (individual sessions, small groups and classroom lessons) and indirect services (consulting with parents, teachers and outside agencies about a student). The state caps regularly scheduled classroom guidance at 40-minute sessions, no more than three a day or ten a week, so the job doesn’t quietly turn into a teaching load.
At the elementary level, the work centers on foundational skills: naming emotions, resolving conflicts, and connecting school behavior to later goals. Middle school counselors add career awareness and early postsecondary planning while handling the social pressure that peaks in those years. High school counselors spend more time on graduation pathways, college applications, FAFSA help and concrete plans for life after 12th grade.
You’ll also sit on the teams that make decisions about individual students, such as Section 504 teams, response-to-intervention teams and positive behavior support programs. Serving on those teams counts as student services under state rules. Coordinating them, along with state testing and master schedules, counts as administrative work, and Arkansas limits how much of your time on student contact days can go to that (more on that below).
Job Outlook in Arkansas
Arkansas projects about 200 job openings a year for school counselors from 2024 to 2034. The state’s own projections break that down: about 24 a year come from new positions, and the rest come from counselors leaving the workforce or moving into other occupations. Over the same period, employment in this occupation is projected to grow 10.8% in Arkansas, compared with 3.5% for the U.S. as a whole in the same projection round.
About 2,310 people worked in this occupation in Arkansas in May 2025. Not all of those jobs are in the metro areas. BLS also publishes estimates for the state’s nonmetropolitan regions, and pay there tends to run lower, as the salary tables below show.
School counselor licenses in Arkansas come from DESE, not from the Arkansas Board of Examiners in Counseling, which licenses professional counselors. DESE’s licensure area is Guidance/Counseling (K-12), available as a first license or as an endorsement on an existing educator license, and state rules also let a counselor serve under an additional licensure plan while finishing requirements. The Arkansas school counselor certification page covers the details.
School Counselor Salary in Arkansas
Arkansas school counselors earned a median salary of $59,770 in May 2025, $4,560 below the national median of $64,330. These figures cover the federal category for educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors (SOC 21-1012), which includes some workers outside K-12 schools. Where you work matters: the metro medians below run from $52,420 in Jonesboro to $66,270 in Fort Smith.
| Percentile | Annual Salary (May 2025) |
|---|---|
| 10th | $38,520 |
| 25th | $46,610 |
| Median (50th) | $59,770 |
| 75th | $67,570 |
| 90th | $78,070 |
| Metro Area | Median Salary (May 2025) |
|---|---|
| Fort Smith, AR-OK | $66,270 |
| Hot Springs, AR | $65,790 |
| Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway, AR | $61,660 |
| Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR | $61,600 |
| South Arkansas nonmetropolitan area | $58,180 |
| Jonesboro, AR | $52,420 |
CACREP-Accredited School Counseling Programs in Arkansas
Two universities in Arkansas offer a CACREP-accredited school counseling master’s. They’re listed below by size, not quality.
| Institution | City | Degree | Accredited Through | Master’s Graduates (2023) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| University of Arkansas Fayetteville | Fayetteville | M.S. | March 31, 2029 | 39 |
| Henderson State University | Arkadelphia | M.S.E. | October 31, 2027 | 2 |
CACREP lists the University of Arkansas program as Accredited (Progress Report Required) and the Henderson State program as Accredited (Reaffirmation in Process). Henderson State’s current accreditation cycle ends October 31, 2027, so confirm its status with the program before you enroll.
CACREP accreditation alone doesn’t make you eligible for an Arkansas educator license. DESE issues school counselor licenses, so confirm with any program, accredited or not, that it leads to Arkansas’s Guidance/Counseling (K-12) license.
Arkansas caps a counselor’s administrative time on student contact days
Under DESE’s Rules Governing School Counseling Programs, which carry out the School Counseling Improvement Act of 2019, a school counselor must spend at least 90% of working time on student contact days providing direct and indirect services to students. On those same days, administrative work, including coordinating state testing, building master schedules and cafeteria or bus duty, can’t take up more than 10%. When you interview, it’s fair to ask how the district tracks that split.
How this table was built. Every program here is accredited by CACREP as a School Counseling program, verified against the CACREP register on September 30, 2026. Any program whose CACREP status shows a teach-out, closure, show-cause, or withdrawal is excluded, because a reader cannot reliably enroll in it. Programs are ordered by the number of master’s graduates each university reported to the federal IPEDS survey for 2023 under CIP code 13.1101, which measures size, not quality. That count covers the whole university, so a school running more than one school counseling master’s reports them together, and a low count can mean some graduates are reported under a different code. Treat the order as a rough guide to size rather than a ranking. CACREP accreditation is not the same as state approval: check the Arkansas requirements for school counselor certification before you enroll.
- About 200 openings a year: Arkansas projects about 200 school counselor openings a year from 2024 to 2034, with employment up 10.8% against 3.5% nationally over the same period.
- Pay below the national median: The May 2025 median was $59,770, compared with $64,330 nationally, and metro medians range from $52,420 to $66,270.
- Protected student time: On student contact days, state rules require counselors to spend at least 90% of their working time on direct and indirect services.
- Two CACREP programs in the state: The University of Arkansas and Henderson State University offer CACREP-accredited school counseling master’s degrees.
If Arkansas is where you plan to work, the next step is mapping the degree, fieldwork and license in the right order.
