Editors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($36,200) to the 90th ($140,840). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 95,480 people in May 2024, 0.06% of every job BLS counted. New York is the largest employer at 17,410 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 42.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in District of Columbia, whose location quotient of 8.17 says this work is 8.17 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $140,840, which is 3.9 times the $36,200 at the 10th, a difference of $104,640 annually. Because the mean wage ($85,700) sits above the median ($75,260), 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $98,620; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Editors stands number 281 by employment and number 251 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 14% more than its group median, and it supplies 4.8% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 10 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $75,260, 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 17,280 jobs, 18.1% 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, Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $64,650 a year, against $117,790 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $6,272 a month before tax, $2,895 biweekly, $1,447 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($50,210) to the 75th ($101,210) is worth $51,000 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 $82,786 would sit between the median ($75,260) and the 75th percentile ($101,210), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $50,210, is $25,050 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: Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners, Music Directors and Composers, Set and Exhibit Designers, Lighting Technicians, Fine Artists, Including Painters, Sculptors, and Illustrators, Designers, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.