First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other 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 ($40,750) to the 90th ($102,360). 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

The occupation employed 20,460 people in May 2024, 0.01% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 2,130 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 27.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Wyoming, whose location quotient of 4.11 says this work is 4.11 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $40,750 or less, and one in ten earns $102,360 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.5 to 1 and the annual gap is $61,610. The mean ($73,320) versus median ($74,960) comparison shows an unusually symmetric ladder in this occupation.

Pay by state

New York posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $92,160, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other stands number 555 by employment and number 254 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 28% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 19 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $74,960, 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 1,980 jobs, 9.7% 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $66,560 a year, against $85,820 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: $6,247 a month before tax, $2,883 biweekly, $1,442 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($51,860) to the 75th ($90,600) is worth $38,740 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 $82,456 would sit between the median ($74,960) and the 75th percentile ($90,600), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $51,860, is $23,100 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Firefighters, First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives, Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers, Detectives and Criminal Investigators, First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers, Crossing Guards and Flaggers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.