Child, Family, and School Social Workers 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 Child, Family, and School Social Workers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $47,480. 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 382,960 jobs nationally, Child, Family, and School Social Workers make up 0.25% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 55,220 of those jobs, the top three states hold 28.4%, and the deepest concentration sits in Alaska (location quotient 1.91, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $40,580 or less, and one in ten earns $94,030 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.3 to 1 and the annual gap is $53,450. The mean ($62,920) versus median ($58,570) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Connecticut at $78,940; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Child, Family, and School Social Workers stands number 97 by employment and number 429 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Community and Social Service Occupations, the group median wage is $59,190 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 1% less than its group median, and it supplies 14.9% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 24 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $58,570, 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 23,100 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, Brownsville-Harlingen, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $43,270 a year, against $85,500 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 annual wage of $58,570 works out to $4,881 a month before taxes, $2,253 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,126 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,480) to the 75th ($74,060) is worth $26,580 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $64,427 would sit between the median ($58,570) and the 75th percentile ($74,060), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,480, is $11,090 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Community and Social Service Occupations

Sibling occupations in Community and Social Service Occupations: Social and Human Service Assistants, Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors, Healthcare Social Workers, Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers, Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other, Rehabilitation Counselors. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.