Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors worker at that point in the distribution, so $83,490 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 342,350, or 0.22% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 44,160 jobs; the top three states sum to 29.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Delaware posts a location quotient of 1.66, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $105,870, which is 2.4 times the $43,580 at the 10th, a difference of $62,290 annually. Because the mean wage ($71,520) sits above the median ($65,140), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

The state spread for Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors runs from the $94,320 median in California down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (44,160 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors stands number 107 by employment and number 329 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Community and Social Service Occupations, the group median wage is $59,190 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 10% more than its group median, and it supplies 13.3% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $65,140, 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 18,980 jobs, 5.5% 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, College Station-Bryan, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $48,640 a year, against $105,680 in Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA. 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

The median annual wage of $65,140 works out to $5,428 a month before taxes, $2,505 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,253 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($51,690) to the 75th ($83,490) is worth $31,800 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $71,654 would sit between the median ($65,140) and the 75th percentile ($83,490), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $51,690, is $13,450 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Community and Social Service Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other, Rehabilitation Counselors, Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists, Marriage and Family Therapists, Health Education Specialists, Social Workers, All Other. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.