Funeral Attendants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Funeral Attendants worker at that point in the distribution, so $39,230 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

With 30,560 jobs nationally, Funeral Attendants make up 0.02% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 1,980 of those jobs, the top three states hold 17.1%, and the deepest concentration sits in West Virginia (location quotient 2.77, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $29,420 at the 25th percentile, $34,610 at the middle, $39,230 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $19,870, a ratio of 1.7 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 1,980 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New Hampshire would lead at $53,420. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Funeral Attendants stands number 480 by employment and number 796 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Personal Care and Service Occupations, the group median wage is $37,320 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 7% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.0% of the group's 3,159,920 jobs. In 23 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $34,610, 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 1,250 jobs, 4.1% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 130 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $32,610 a year, against $46,690 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $34,610 a year is $2,884 a month gross, $1,331 every two weeks, $666 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($29,420) to the 75th ($39,230) is worth $9,810 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $2,884 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $38,071 would sit between the median ($34,610) and the 75th percentile ($39,230), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $29,420, is $5,190 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Personal Care and Service Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Amusement and Recreation Attendants, Recreation Workers, Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors, Hairdressers, Hairstylists, and Cosmetologists, Animal Caretakers, Manicurists and Pedicurists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.