Animal Trainers 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 Animal Trainers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $32,870. 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

May 2024 employment stood at 20,110, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 2,470 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.7% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Alaska posts a location quotient of 1.96, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $70,800, which is 2.4 times the $29,120 at the 10th, a difference of $41,680 annually. Because the mean wage ($45,780) sits above the median ($38,750), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 2,470 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Hawaii would lead at $72,080. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Animal Trainers stands number 560 by employment and number 725 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Personal Care and Service Occupations, the group median wage is $37,320 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 4% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 3,159,920 jobs. In 17 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $38,750, 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 1,230 jobs, 6.1% 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, Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $36,760 a year, against $65,580 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,229 a month before tax, $1,490 biweekly, $745 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($32,870) to the 75th ($48,900) is worth $16,030 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $42,625 would sit between the median ($38,750) and the 75th percentile ($48,900), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $32,870, is $5,880 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Personal Care and Service Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Gambling Service Workers, All Other, Shampooers, Entertainment Attendants and Related Workers, All Other, Gambling and Sports Book Writers and Runners, Costume Attendants, Embalmers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.