Art Directors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Art Directors offer sit among all 50,370 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

With 50,370 jobs nationally, Art Directors make up 0.03% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 12,540 of those jobs, the top three states hold 46.8%, and the deepest concentration sits in New York (location quotient 2.66, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $61,060 or less, and one in ten earns $211,410 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 3.5 to 1 and the annual gap is $150,350. The mean ($128,100) versus median ($111,040) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 47 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Oregon at $148,410; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Art Directors stands number 387 by employment and number 82 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations, the group median wage is $66,220 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 68% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.5% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 8 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $111,040, 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 8,760 jobs, 17.4% 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $90,660 a year, against $172,310 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $9,253 a month before tax, $4,271 biweekly, $2,135 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($80,130) to the 75th ($160,460) is worth $80,330 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 $122,144 would sit between the median ($111,040) and the 75th percentile ($160,460), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $80,130, is $30,910 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

Sibling occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations: Writers and Authors, News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, Floral Designers, Commercial and Industrial Designers, Film and Video Editors, Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.