Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners offer sit among all 12,630 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 12,630 Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Indiana, where the location quotient is 3.23, meaning the occupation holds 3.23 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 1,590 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 30.9% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $39,100 or less, and one in ten earns $127,020 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 3.2 to 1 and the annual gap is $87,920. The mean ($74,630) versus median ($67,310) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 39 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $109,220; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners stands number 647 by employment and number 305 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations, the group median wage is $66,220 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 2% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 16 of the 39 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $67,310, 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 800 jobs, 6.3% 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, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $106,640 a year, against $106,640 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners paycheck, gross, is $2,589 every two weeks on an annual $67,310, which is $5,609 a month and $1,294 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($50,210) to the 75th ($92,710) is worth $42,500 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 $74,041 would sit between the median ($67,310) and the 75th percentile ($92,710), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $50,210, is $17,100 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

Sibling occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations: Public Relations Specialists, Coaches and Scouts, Graphic Designers, Merchandise Displayers and Window Trimmers, Producers and Directors, Editors. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.