The paper deals with a new method of evaluation of if the teacher corresponds to the category. At a meeting of the State Council on the improvement of the educational system in the Russian Federation, the President proposed to develop and implement a national system of teachers’ professional development. In this paper the assessment is based on an integrated index, which is calculated as a weighted sum of two partial assessments. Results of assessment of characteristics that define the professional and personal qualities of teachers, assessment of the teacher's qualifications are given in the paper, and degrees of complexity of their work are set. The article describes established graduations to determine whether teachers correspond to their categories. On the basis of this approach that compare the categories that should be assigned to the teacher after the described calculation, with the categories which the teacher currently has in accordance with the decision of the school management, it can be said that the proposed approach allows to determine the level of compliance of teachers to available categories more reasonably.