Hotel, Motel, and Resort Desk Clerks Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Hotel, Motel, and Resort Desk Clerks ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $29,210. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 261,430 people in May 2024, 0.17% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 27,500 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 27.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Montana, whose location quotient of 2.86 says this work is 2.86 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $29,210 at the 25th percentile, $34,270 at the middle, $37,430 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $18,120, 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 California first at 27,500 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Hawaii would lead at $58,740. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Hotel, Motel, and Resort Desk Clerks stands number 135 by employment and number 806 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 28% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.4% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $34,270, 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 8,310 jobs, 3.2% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

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, $26,140 a year, against $59,140 in Kahului-Wailuku, HI. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $34,270 a year is $2,856 a month gross, $1,318 every two weeks, $659 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($29,210) to the 75th ($37,430) is worth $8,220 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 $2,856 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 $37,697 would sit between the median ($34,270) and the 75th percentile ($37,430), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $29,210, is $5,060 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Credit Authorizers, Checkers, and Clerks, Correspondence Clerks, Statistical Assistants, Proofreaders and Copy Markers, Desktop Publishers, Telephone Operators. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.