Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film 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 Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $48,060. 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

May 2024 employment stood at 24,460, or 0.02% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 5,520 jobs; the top three states sum to 44.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: New Mexico posts a location quotient of 3.10, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $131,420, which is 3.6 times the $36,240 at the 10th, a difference of $95,180 annually. Because the mean wage ($79,870) sits above the median ($68,810), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 5,520 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $101,610. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film stands number 517 by employment and number 291 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 4% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.2% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 9 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $68,810, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 3,790 jobs, 15.5% 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, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $61,660 a year, against $106,170 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, 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: $5,734 a month before tax, $2,647 biweekly, $1,323 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,060) to the 75th ($102,400) is worth $54,340 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 $75,691 would sit between the median ($68,810) and the 75th percentile ($102,400), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,060, is $20,750 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, Floral Designers, Commercial and Industrial Designers, Film and Video Editors, Broadcast Announcers and Radio Disc Jockeys, Media and Communication Workers, All Other. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.