Human Resources Specialists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Human Resources Specialists offer sit among all 917,460 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 917,460, or 0.60% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 104,880 jobs; the top three states sum to 27.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: District of Columbia posts a location quotient of 1.69, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $81,100 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($126,540) is 2.8 times the 10th percentile ($45,440), a gap of $81,100 a year. The mean of $79,730 sitting above the median of $72,910 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $102,500, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Human Resources Specialists stands number 37 by employment and number 266 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 7% less than its group median, and it supplies 8.9% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 14 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $72,910, 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 52,150 jobs, 5.7% 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, $43,680 a year, against $125,120 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

The median Human Resources Specialists paycheck, gross, is $2,804 every two weeks on an annual $72,910, which is $6,076 a month and $1,402 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($55,870) to the 75th ($97,270) is worth $41,400 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 $80,201 would sit between the median ($72,910) and the 75th percentile ($97,270), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $55,870, is $17,040 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Management Analysts, Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, Buyers and Purchasing Agents, Training and Development Specialists, Compliance Officers, Financial and Investment Analysts. The full directory is on the Careers hub.