Film and Video Editors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Film and Video Editors offer sit among all 28,860 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

BLS counted 28,860 Film and Video Editors jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Vermont, where the location quotient is 3.24, meaning the occupation holds 3.24 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 9,110 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 49.8% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $39,170 or less, and one in ten earns $145,900 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 3.7 to 1 and the annual gap is $106,730. The mean ($83,530) versus median ($70,980) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

The state spread for Film and Video Editors runs from the $102,450 median in New York down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (9,110 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Film and Video Editors stands number 488 by employment and number 281 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 7% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.5% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 7 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $70,980, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 6,730 jobs, 23.3% 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, Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $91,670 a year, against $110,720 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 Film and Video Editors paycheck, gross, is $2,730 every two weeks on an annual $70,980, which is $5,915 a month and $1,365 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($50,230) to the 75th ($101,570) is worth $51,340 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $78,078 would sit between the median ($70,980) and the 75th percentile ($101,570), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $50,230, is $20,750 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Interior Designers, Technical Writers, Interpreters and Translators, Photographers, Art Directors, Writers and Authors. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.