Fire Inspectors and Investigators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Fire Inspectors and Investigators worker at that point in the distribution, so $105,390 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

The occupation employed 14,050 people in May 2024, 0.01% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 1,260 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 24.5% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Connecticut, whose location quotient of 2.81 says this work is 2.81 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $102,290 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($149,870) is 3.1 times the 10th percentile ($47,580), a gap of $102,290 a year. The mean of $87,440 sitting above the median of $78,060 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 California first at 1,260 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $116,950. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Fire Inspectors and Investigators stands number 628 by employment and number 229 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Protective Service Occupations, the group median wage is $58,610 across 24 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 33% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 11 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $78,060, 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

Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL is the largest metro employer with 1,780 jobs, 12.7% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $78,450 a year, against $148,530 in Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Fire Inspectors and Investigators paycheck, gross, is $3,002 every two weeks on an annual $78,060, which is $6,505 a month and $1,501 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($60,700) to the 75th ($105,390) is worth $44,690 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 $85,866 would sit between the median ($78,060) and the 75th percentile ($105,390), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $60,700, is $17,360 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Protective Service Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other, Bailiffs, Animal Control Workers, Gambling Surveillance Officers and Gambling Investigators, Parking Enforcement Workers, Fish and Game Wardens. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.