Couriers and Messengers 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 Couriers and Messengers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $35,130. 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

The occupation employed 71,920 people in May 2024, 0.05% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 8,970 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 30.8% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in New York, whose location quotient of 1.69 says this work is 1.69 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $20,710 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($50,590) is 1.7 times the 10th percentile ($29,880), a gap of $20,710 a year. The mean of $40,060 sitting above the median of $38,340 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Colorado at $44,610; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Couriers and Messengers stands number 324 by employment and number 733 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 20% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 21 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $38,340, 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 7,130 jobs, 9.9% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $24,890 a year, against $49,470 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 annual wage of $38,340 works out to $3,195 a month before taxes, $1,475 per biweekly paycheck, and $737 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,130) to the 75th ($44,630) is worth $9,500 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 $42,174 would sit between the median ($38,340) and the 75th percentile ($44,630), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,130, is $3,210 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

Sibling occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations: Mail Clerks and Mail Machine Operators, Except Postal Service, Procurement Clerks, Weighers, Measurers, Checkers, and Samplers, Recordkeeping, Brokerage Clerks, New Accounts Clerks, Financial Clerks, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.