Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks 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 ($34,600) to the 90th ($72,660). 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

BLS counted 1,455,770 Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks jobs in May 2024, which is 0.94% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in South Dakota, where the location quotient is 2.30, meaning the occupation holds 2.30 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 154,980 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 27.0% of the national total.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $38,060 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($72,660) is 2.1 times the 10th percentile ($34,600), a gap of $38,060 a year. The mean of $52,020 sitting above the median of $49,210 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $62,470, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks stands number 19 by employment and number 537 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 3% more than its group median, and it supplies 8.0% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 18 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $49,210, 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 87,860 jobs, 6.0% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $30,170 a year, against $68,390 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

The median Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks paycheck, gross, is $1,893 every two weeks on an annual $49,210, which is $4,101 a month and $946 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($41,390) to the 75th ($60,220) is worth $18,830 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 $54,131 would sit between the median ($49,210) and the 75th percentile ($60,220), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $41,390, is $7,820 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Postal Service Mail Carriers, Hotel, Motel, and Resort Desk Clerks, Insurance Claims and Policy Processing Clerks, Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance, Office and Administrative Support Workers, All Other, Loan Interviewers and Clerks. The full directory is on the Careers hub.