Healthcare Social 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 ($45,030) to the 90th ($100,870). 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 185,940 people in May 2024, 0.12% of every job BLS counted. New York is the largest employer at 22,880 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 29.1% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in New York, whose location quotient of 1.99 says this work is 1.99 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $45,030 or less, and one in ten earns $100,870 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.2 to 1 and the annual gap is $55,840. The mean ($72,030) versus median ($68,090) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $92,970, and New York the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Healthcare Social Workers stands number 170 by employment and number 298 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 15% more than its group median, and it supplies 7.2% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $68,090, 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 18,860 jobs, 10.1% 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, $38,070 a year, against $110,570 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $5,674 a month before tax, $2,619 biweekly, $1,309 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($55,360) to the 75th ($83,410) is worth $28,050 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 $74,899 would sit between the median ($68,090) and the 75th percentile ($83,410), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $55,360, is $12,730 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Substance Abuse, Behavioral Disorder, and Mental Health Counselors, Social and Human Service Assistants, Child, Family, and School Social Workers, Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors, Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers, Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other. The full directory is on the Careers hub.