Curators 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 Curators ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $47,270. 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 12,280 people in May 2024, 0.01% of every job BLS counted. New York is the largest employer at 1,270 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 24.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Wyoming, whose location quotient of 3.79 says this work is 3.79 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $105,520, which is 2.8 times the $37,110 at the 10th, a difference of $68,410 annually. Because the mean wage ($70,060) sits above the median ($61,770), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 49 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $81,990; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Curators stands number 657 by employment and number 379 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Educational Instruction and Library Occupations, the group median wage is $76,210 across 64 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 19% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 16 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $61,770, 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 950 jobs, 7.7% 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, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $108,080 a year, against $108,080 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $5,148 a month before tax, $2,376 biweekly, $1,188 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,270) to the 75th ($81,350) is worth $34,080 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 $67,947 would sit between the median ($61,770) and the 75th percentile ($81,350), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,270, is $14,500 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Educational Instruction and Library Occupations

Sibling occupations in Educational Instruction and Library Occupations: Recreation and Fitness Studies Teachers, Postsecondary, Economics Teachers, Postsecondary, Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary, Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies Teachers, Postsecondary, Farm and Home Management Educators. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.