Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other 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 ($36,470) to the 90th ($83,210). 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

May 2024 employment stood at 110,390, or 0.07% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 16,040 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Vermont posts a location quotient of 11.68, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $46,740 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($83,210) is 2.3 times the 10th percentile ($36,470), a gap of $46,740 a year. The mean of $58,360 sitting above the median of $54,940 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is North Dakota at $74,700; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other stands number 252 by employment and number 469 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 7% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.3% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 11 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $54,940, 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 5,940 jobs, 5.4% 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, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $43,280 a year, against $74,380 in Richmond, VA. 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

The median annual wage of $54,940 works out to $4,578 a month before taxes, $2,113 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,057 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($45,420) to the 75th ($67,590) is worth $22,170 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 $60,434 would sit between the median ($54,940) and the 75th percentile ($67,590), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $45,420, is $9,520 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: Child, Family, and School Social Workers, Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors, Healthcare Social Workers, Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers, Rehabilitation Counselors, Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.