Advertising Sales Agents Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($33,480) to the 90th ($133,540). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

With 97,470 jobs nationally, Advertising Sales Agents make up 0.06% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: New York alone holds 16,190 of those jobs, the top three states hold 31.6%, and the deepest concentration sits in New York (location quotient 2.68, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $100,060 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($133,540) is 4.0 times the 10th percentile ($33,480), a gap of $100,060 a year. The mean of $76,350 sitting above the median of $61,460 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts New York first at 16,190 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New York would lead at $94,990. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Advertising Sales Agents stands number 277 by employment and number 387 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Sales and Related Occupations, the group median wage is $56,320 across 22 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 9% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 12 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $61,460, 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 15,730 jobs, 16.1% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Pittsburgh, PA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $53,880 a year, against $113,120 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Advertising Sales Agents paycheck, gross, is $2,364 every two weeks on an annual $61,460, which is $5,122 a month and $1,182 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($44,980) to the 75th ($91,430) is worth $46,450 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $67,606 would sit between the median ($61,460) and the 75th percentile ($91,430), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $44,980, is $16,480 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Sales and Related Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Demonstrators and Product Promoters, Travel Agents, Sales Engineers, Real Estate Brokers, Gambling Change Persons and Booth Cashiers, Models. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.