Correctional Officers and Jailers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Correctional Officers and Jailers worker at that point in the distribution, so $75,330 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 365,380 people in May 2024, 0.24% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 39,150 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 29.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Arizona, whose location quotient of 1.83 says this work is 1.83 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $51,250 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($93,000) is 2.2 times the 10th percentile ($41,750), a gap of $51,250 a year. The mean of $62,760 sitting above the median of $57,970 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 California at $95,840; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Correctional Officers and Jailers stands number 102 by employment and number 443 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Protective Service Occupations, the group median wage is $58,610 across 24 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 1% less than its group median, and it supplies 10.0% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 23 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $57,970, 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 15,680 jobs, 4.3% 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, Jefferson City, MO posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $41,570 a year, against $123,750 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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 Correctional Officers and Jailers paycheck, gross, is $2,230 every two weeks on an annual $57,970, which is $4,831 a month and $1,115 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,520) to the 75th ($75,330) is worth $27,810 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 $63,767 would sit between the median ($57,970) and the 75th percentile ($75,330), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,520, is $10,450 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Protective Service Occupations

Sibling occupations in Protective Service Occupations: Private Detectives and Investigators, First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other, Bailiffs, Fire Inspectors and Investigators, Animal Control Workers, Gambling Surveillance Officers and Gambling Investigators. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.