Data Entry Keyers 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 Data Entry Keyers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $34,900. 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

May 2024 employment stood at 135,280, or 0.09% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 19,950 jobs; the top three states sum to 32.4% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Texas posts a location quotient of 1.64, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $26,830 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($56,930) is 1.9 times the 10th percentile ($30,100), a gap of $26,830 a year. The mean of $42,070 sitting above the median of $39,850 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $51,860, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Data Entry Keyers stands number 224 by employment and number 707 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 17% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 21 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $39,850, 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 11,000 jobs, 8.1% 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, $28,980 a year, against $52,820 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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 Data Entry Keyers paycheck, gross, is $1,533 every two weeks on an annual $39,850, which is $3,321 a month and $766 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($34,900) to the 75th ($47,260) is worth $12,360 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 $43,835 would sit between the median ($39,850) and the 75th percentile ($47,260), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $34,900, is $4,950 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: File Clerks, Postal Service Clerks, Couriers and Messengers, Mail Clerks and Mail Machine Operators, Except Postal Service, Procurement Clerks, Weighers, Measurers, Checkers, and Samplers, Recordkeeping. The full directory is on the Careers hub.