First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers offer sit among all 53,390 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 53,390, or 0.03% of the U.S. total. Florida leads the state table with 6,250 jobs; the top three states sum to 28.5% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Arkansas posts a location quotient of 3.63, 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 $50,340 or less, and one in ten earns $125,170 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.5 to 1 and the annual gap is $74,830. The mean ($82,260) versus median ($76,310) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 49 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $127,380; the jobs leader is Florida:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers stands number 377 by employment and number 246 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 30% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.5% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 22 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $76,310, 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 2,020 jobs, 3.8% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway, AR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $54,350 a year, against $134,310 in Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers paycheck, gross, is $2,935 every two weeks on an annual $76,310, which is $6,359 a month and $1,468 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($56,890) to the 75th ($102,190) is worth $45,300 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 $83,941 would sit between the median ($76,310) and the 75th percentile ($102,190), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $56,890, is $19,420 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

Sibling occupations in Protective Service Occupations: First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other, Bailiffs, Fire Inspectors and Investigators, Animal Control Workers, Gambling Surveillance Officers and Gambling Investigators, Parking Enforcement Workers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.