Detectives and Criminal Investigators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Detectives and Criminal Investigators offer sit among all 110,790 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

With 110,790 jobs nationally, Detectives and Criminal Investigators make up 0.07% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 18,020 of those jobs, the top three states hold 35.5%, and the deepest concentration sits in New Mexico (location quotient 3.23, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $159,410, which is 2.9 times the $54,160 at the 10th, a difference of $105,250 annually. Because the mean wage ($98,770) sits above the median ($93,580), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 18,020 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Maryland would lead at $125,630. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Detectives and Criminal Investigators stands number 251 by employment and number 152 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 60% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.0% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 18 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $93,580, 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 7,460 jobs, 6.7% 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, Tallahassee, FL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $63,130 a year, against $144,050 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $7,798 a month before tax, $3,599 biweekly, $1,800 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($68,390) to the 75th ($120,080) is worth $51,690 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 $102,938 would sit between the median ($93,580) and the 75th percentile ($120,080), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $68,390, is $25,190 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers, First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers, Crossing Guards and Flaggers, Protective Service Workers, All Other, School Bus Monitors, First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.