Buyers and Purchasing Agents 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 ($46,460) to the 90th ($127,520). 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

The occupation employed 486,900 people in May 2024, 0.32% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 46,790 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 23.8% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Virginia, whose location quotient of 1.66 says this work is 1.66 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $46,460 or less, and one in ten earns $127,520 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.7 to 1 and the annual gap is $81,060. The mean ($81,720) versus median ($75,650) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $117,960, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Buyers and Purchasing Agents stands number 71 by employment and number 250 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 4% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.7% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 15 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $75,650, 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 29,510 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $34,130 a year, against $113,000 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $6,304 a month before tax, $2,910 biweekly, $1,455 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($58,670) to the 75th ($99,190) is worth $40,520 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 $83,215 would sit between the median ($75,650) and the 75th percentile ($99,190), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $58,670, is $16,980 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Compliance Officers, Financial and Investment Analysts, Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators, Loan Officers, Personal Financial Advisors, Logisticians. The full directory is on the Careers hub.