Emotional labor was first coined by Hochschild (1983) to describe the tensions that Delta Airlines flight attendants went through as a result of following the feeling rules prescribed by their airliner’s top managers. Accordingly, the flight attendants were expected to show unwavering kindness to the passengers throughout the flights. This job requirement was later revealed to cause serious conflict between the flight attendants’ assigned and authentic selves (Hochschild, 1983). Applying the concept to the field of English Language Teaching (ELT), Benesch (2017) began to employ emotion labor to refer to the discrepancies between institutional demands and teachers’ preferences. Benesch challenged Hochschild’s dichotomization of the selves as assigned and authentic on the grounds that unequal power relations at work would prompt some individuals to speak up for change. She also preferred using emotion labor (over emotional labor) to mitigate against the negativity associated with the word emotional. Relatedly, she has been vocal in proposing that emotion labor could serve as a catalyst for agency enactment (Benesch, 2018). Sharing Benesch’s opinion, we purposefully employ the term emotion labor throughout this report. Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in qualitative case studies on language teachers’ emotion labor (e.g., Aminifard et al., 2023; Nazari & Karimpour, 2022; Song, 2016, 2021). However, there has been a dearth of quantitative studies investigating if the demographic characteristics of language teachers exert a significant effect on the extent of their felt emotion labor. Moreover, the field requires exploring which aspects of teaching English generate a greater demand for emotion labor. Therefore, in this paper, we adopted a quantitative approach to address the aforementioned issues with regard to Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. The research questions were: 1. Do Iranian EFL teachers’ gender, career length, and affiliation cause them to experience significantly different degrees of emotion labor? 2. Which aspects of ELT in Iran generate more demand for emotion labor on the part of EFL teachers in public schools and private language institutes (PLIs)?