Budget Analysts Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Budget Analysts offer sit among all 47,170 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 47,170 jobs nationally, Budget Analysts make up 0.03% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 3,840 of those jobs, the top three states hold 23.3%, and the deepest concentration sits in District of Columbia (location quotient 7.91, 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: $74,130 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($134,640) is 2.2 times the 10th percentile ($60,510), a gap of $74,130 a year. The mean of $93,920 sitting above the median of $87,930 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 Texas first at 3,840 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $117,960. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Budget Analysts stands number 400 by employment and number 169 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 12% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $87,930, 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

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV is the largest metro employer with 4,830 jobs, 10.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 165 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Raleigh-Cary, NC posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $81,440 a year, against $123,260 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Budget Analysts paycheck, gross, is $3,382 every two weeks on an annual $87,930, which is $7,328 a month and $1,691 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($72,240) to the 75th ($110,380) is worth $38,140 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 $96,723 would sit between the median ($87,930) and the 75th percentile ($110,380), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $72,240, is $15,690 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Human Resources Specialists, Management Analysts, Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, Buyers and Purchasing Agents, Training and Development Specialists, Compliance Officers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.