Compliance Officers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Compliance Officers offer sit among all 397,770 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

BLS counted 397,770 Compliance Officers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.26% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Vermont, where the location quotient is 2.45, meaning the occupation holds 2.45 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 47,420 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 29.9% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $130,030, which is 2.8 times the $46,230 at the 10th, a difference of $83,800 annually. Because the mean wage ($84,980) sits above the median ($78,420), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

The state spread for Compliance Officers runs from the $103,010 median in District of Columbia down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (47,420 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Compliance Officers stands number 91 by employment and number 221 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 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.8% 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 $78,420, 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 22,410 jobs, 5.6% 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, Jefferson City, MO posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $50,560 a year, against $125,790 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $6,535 a month before tax, $3,016 biweekly, $1,508 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($59,130) to the 75th ($104,800) is worth $45,670 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 $86,262 would sit between the median ($78,420) and the 75th percentile ($104,800), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $59,130, is $19,290 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Financial Examiners, Property Appraisers and Assessors, Financial Risk Specialists, Tax Examiners and Collectors, and Revenue Agents, Budget Analysts, Credit Counselors. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.