Insurance Sales Agents 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 ($36,390) to the 90th ($135,660). 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 469,480 people in May 2024, 0.30% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 44,670 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 27.7% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Nebraska, whose location quotient of 1.74 says this work is 1.74 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $135,660, which is 3.7 times the $36,390 at the 10th, a difference of $99,270 annually. Because the mean wage ($81,510) sits above the median ($60,370), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 44,670 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Minnesota would lead at $78,650. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Insurance Sales Agents stands number 76 by employment and number 403 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Sales and Related Occupations, the group median wage is $56,320 across 22 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 7% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.5% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $60,370, 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 19,570 jobs, 4.2% 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, $40,750 a year, against $113,690 in Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY. 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

The median annual wage of $60,370 works out to $5,031 a month before taxes, $2,322 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,161 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($45,520) to the 75th ($91,150) is worth $45,630 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $66,407 would sit between the median ($60,370) and the 75th percentile ($91,150), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $45,520, is $14,850 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Sales and Related Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Travel Agents, Sales Engineers, Real Estate Brokers, Gambling Change Persons and Booth Cashiers, Models, Door-to-Door Sales Workers, News and Street Vendors, and Related Workers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.