Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators 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 ($47,810) to the 90th ($112,150). 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 305,020 people in May 2024, 0.20% of every job BLS counted. Florida is the largest employer at 28,450 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 25.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Arizona, whose location quotient of 2.35 says this work is 2.35 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $47,810 or less, and one in ten earns $112,150 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.3 to 1 and the annual gap is $64,340. The mean ($78,770) versus median ($76,790) 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 Maryland at $92,660; the jobs leader is Florida:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators stands number 119 by employment and number 243 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 2% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.9% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $76,790, 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 13,930 jobs, 4.6% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $47,120 a year, against $102,490 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $6,399 a month before tax, $2,953 biweekly, $1,477 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($60,100) to the 75th ($95,990) is worth $35,890 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 $84,469 would sit between the median ($76,790) and the 75th percentile ($95,990), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $60,100, is $16,690 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

Sibling occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations: Financial Examiners, Property Appraisers and Assessors, Financial Risk Specialists, Tax Examiners and Collectors, and Revenue Agents, Budget Analysts, Credit Counselors. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.