Interpreters and Translators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Interpreters and Translators worker at that point in the distribution, so $80,020 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 53,360 people in May 2024, 0.03% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 6,710 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 31.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Virginia, whose location quotient of 1.86 says this work is 1.86 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $45,020 at the 25th percentile, $59,440 at the middle, $80,020 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $64,200, a ratio of 2.8 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

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $84,650; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Interpreters and Translators stands number 379 by employment and number 418 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations, the group median wage is $66,220 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.7% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 15 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $59,440, 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 3,060 jobs, 5.7% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $49,410 a year, against $92,050 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $59,440 a year is $4,953 a month gross, $2,286 every two weeks, $1,143 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($45,020) to the 75th ($80,020) is worth $35,000 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 $4,953 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 $65,384 would sit between the median ($59,440) and the 75th percentile ($80,020), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $45,020, is $14,420 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

Sibling occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations: Technical Writers, Photographers, Art Directors, Writers and Authors, News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, Floral Designers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.