First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers 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 ($53,970) to the 90th ($142,300). 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 93,680, or 0.06% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 9,180 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Rhode Island posts a location quotient of 2.60, 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: $88,330 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($142,300) is 2.6 times the 10th percentile ($53,970), a gap of $88,330 a year. The mean of $97,030 sitting above the median of $92,430 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New Jersey at $137,650; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers stands number 284 by employment and number 157 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 58% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.6% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 17 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $92,430, 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 4,210 jobs, 4.5% 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, Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $74,040 a year, against $176,140 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $7,702 a month before tax, $3,555 biweekly, $1,778 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($72,240) to the 75th ($115,990) is worth $43,750 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 $101,673 would sit between the median ($92,430) and the 75th percentile ($115,990), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $72,240, is $20,190 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: Private Detectives and Investigators, First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other, Bailiffs, Fire Inspectors and Investigators, Animal Control Workers, Gambling Surveillance Officers and Gambling Investigators. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.