File Clerks 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 ($29,620) to the 90th ($61,080). 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

May 2024 employment stood at 78,980, or 0.05% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 12,820 jobs; the top three states sum to 36.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Montana posts a location quotient of 2.31, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $29,620 or less, and one in ten earns $61,080 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.1 to 1 and the annual gap is $31,460. The mean ($43,700) versus median ($41,270) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 12,820 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $57,560. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, File Clerks stands number 307 by employment and number 684 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 14% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 25 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $41,270, 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 5,150 jobs, 6.5% 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, Oklahoma City, OK posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $40,210 a year, against $61,470 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 $41,270 works out to $3,439 a month before taxes, $1,587 per biweekly paycheck, and $794 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,120) to the 75th ($50,020) is worth $14,900 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 $45,397 would sit between the median ($41,270) and the 75th percentile ($50,020), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,120, is $6,150 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: Information and Record Clerks, All Other, Data Entry Keyers, Reservation and Transportation Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks, Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators, Public Safety Telecommunicators, Cargo and Freight Agents. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.