Audio and Video Technicians 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 Audio and Video Technicians ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $43,860. 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

With 70,080 jobs nationally, Audio and Video Technicians make up 0.05% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 10,140 of those jobs, the top three states hold 35.1%, and the deepest concentration sits in Nevada (location quotient 2.52, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $43,860 at the 25th percentile, $54,830 at the middle, $73,590 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $62,900, a ratio of 2.8 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

New Jersey posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $75,220, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Audio and Video Technicians stands number 330 by employment and number 471 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 17% less than its group median, and it supplies 3.5% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $54,830, 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 7,970 jobs, 11.4% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Salt Lake City-Murray, UT posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $43,180 a year, against $86,480 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $54,830 a year is $4,569 a month gross, $2,109 every two weeks, $1,054 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($43,860) to the 75th ($73,590) is worth $29,730 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 $4,569 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 $60,313 would sit between the median ($54,830) and the 75th percentile ($73,590), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $43,860, is $10,970 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Photographers, Art Directors, Writers and Authors, News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, Floral Designers, Commercial and Industrial Designers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.