Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants offer sit among all 472,770 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

May 2024 employment stood at 472,770, or 0.31% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 88,830 jobs; the top three states sum to 39.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: New York posts a location quotient of 3.04, 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: $59,410 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($107,710) is 2.2 times the 10th percentile ($48,300), a gap of $59,410 a year. The mean of $77,060 sitting above the median of $74,260 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts New York first at 88,830 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $85,520. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants stands number 73 by employment and number 257 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 55% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.6% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 13 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $74,260, 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 79,590 jobs, 16.8% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $38,980 a year, against $112,680 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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 $74,260 works out to $6,188 a month before taxes, $2,856 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,428 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($60,000) to the 75th ($90,440) is worth $30,440 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 $81,686 would sit between the median ($74,260) and the 75th percentile ($90,440), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $60,000, is $14,260 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks, Receptionists and Information Clerks, Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks, Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Billing and Posting Clerks, Production, Planning, and Expediting Clerks. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.