Community Health Workers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Community Health Workers offer sit among all 60,730 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 60,730, or 0.04% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 9,200 jobs; the top three states sum to 33.4% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Alaska posts a location quotient of 3.82, 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 $78,560, which is 2.1 times the $37,930 at the 10th, a difference of $40,630 annually. Because the mean wage ($55,970) sits above the median ($51,030), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $71,550, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Community Health Workers stands number 355 by employment and number 505 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 14% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.4% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $51,030, 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 5,480 jobs, 9.0% 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, $38,870 a year, against $79,890 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

The median Community Health Workers paycheck, gross, is $1,963 every two weeks on an annual $51,030, which is $4,252 a month and $981 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($44,370) to the 75th ($63,150) is worth $18,780 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 $56,133 would sit between the median ($51,030) and the 75th percentile ($63,150), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $44,370, is $6,660 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Marriage and Family Therapists, Health Education Specialists, Social Workers, All Other, Clergy, Counselors, All Other, Directors, Religious Activities and Education. The full directory is on the Careers hub.