Fashion Designers 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 Fashion Designers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $53,730. 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 20,910, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 6,600 jobs; the top three states sum to 67.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: New York posts a location quotient of 5.10, 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: $133,650 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($169,620) is 4.7 times the 10th percentile ($35,970), a gap of $133,650 a year. The mean of $122,430 sitting above the median of $80,690 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Tennessee posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $142,500, and New York the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Fashion Designers stands number 550 by employment and number 203 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 22% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.1% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 9 of the 23 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $80,690, 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 6,350 jobs, 30.4% 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, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $81,350 a year, against $109,670 in Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $6,724 a month before tax, $3,103 biweekly, $1,552 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($53,730) to the 75th ($107,990) is worth $54,260 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 $88,759 would sit between the median ($80,690) and the 75th percentile ($107,990), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $53,730, is $26,960 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Commercial and Industrial Designers, Film and Video Editors, Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film, Broadcast Announcers and Radio Disc Jockeys, Media and Communication Workers, All Other, Special Effects Artists and Animators. The full directory is on the Careers hub.