Clinical and Counseling Psychologists 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 Clinical and Counseling Psychologists ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $67,470. 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

BLS counted 72,190 Clinical and Counseling Psychologists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.05% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Massachusetts, where the location quotient is 2.03, meaning the occupation holds 2.03 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 11,900 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 31.8% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $170,150, which is 3.4 times the $50,470 at the 10th, a difference of $119,680 annually. Because the mean wage ($106,850) sits above the median ($95,830), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Oregon posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $132,550, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Clinical and Counseling Psychologists stands number 322 by employment and number 146 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations, the group median wage is $84,150 across 48 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 14% more than its group median, and it supplies 5.0% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 22 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $95,830, 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 7,610 jobs, 10.5% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $76,480 a year, against $150,060 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Clinical and Counseling Psychologists paycheck, gross, is $3,686 every two weeks on an annual $95,830, which is $7,986 a month and $1,843 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($67,470) to the 75th ($131,510) is worth $64,040 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 $105,413 would sit between the median ($95,830) and the 75th percentile ($131,510), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $67,470, is $28,360 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists, Occupational Health and Safety Specialists, Environmental Scientists and Specialists, Including Health, Chemists, Biological Technicians, Life, Physical, and Social Science Technicians, All Other. The full directory is on the Careers hub.