Health Education Specialists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Health Education Specialists worker at that point in the distribution, so $84,460 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 65,150 people in May 2024, 0.04% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 14,650 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 35.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Maine, whose location quotient of 2.11 says this work is 2.11 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $42,210 or less, and one in ten earns $112,900 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.7 to 1 and the annual gap is $70,690. The mean ($71,700) versus median ($63,000) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 14,650 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $110,620. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Health Education Specialists stands number 339 by employment and number 357 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Community and Social Service Occupations, the group median wage is $59,190 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 6% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.5% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $63,000, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 5,580 jobs, 8.6% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $41,750 a year, against $117,280 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Health Education Specialists paycheck, gross, is $2,423 every two weeks on an annual $63,000, which is $5,250 a month and $1,212 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($49,880) to the 75th ($84,460) is worth $34,580 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 $69,300 would sit between the median ($63,000) and the 75th percentile ($84,460), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $49,880, is $13,120 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Community and Social Service Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Marriage and Family Therapists, Social Workers, All Other, Community Health Workers, Clergy, Counselors, All Other, Directors, Religious Activities and Education. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.