Accountants and Auditors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Accountants and Auditors ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $64,660. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 1,448,290 people in May 2024, 0.94% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 173,370 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 27.3% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in District of Columbia, whose location quotient of 1.44 says this work is 1.44 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $88,640 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($141,420) is 2.7 times the 10th percentile ($52,780), a gap of $88,640 a year. The mean of $93,520 sitting above the median of $81,680 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $103,030; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Accountants and Auditors stands number 21 by employment and number 197 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 4% more than its group median, and it supplies 14.0% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 14 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $81,680, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 114,300 jobs, 7.9% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Aguadilla, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $36,550 a year, against $128,730 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $81,680 a year is $6,807 a month gross, $3,142 every two weeks, $1,571 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($64,660) to the 75th ($106,450) is worth $41,790 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $6,807 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $89,848 would sit between the median ($81,680) and the 75th percentile ($106,450), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $64,660, is $17,020 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

Sibling occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations: Compliance Officers, Financial and Investment Analysts, Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators, Loan Officers, Personal Financial Advisors, Logisticians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.