Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants offer sit among all 154,540 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 154,540, or 0.10% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 23,960 jobs; the top three states sum to 32.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: District of Columbia posts a location quotient of 2.86, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $42,720 at the 25th percentile, $54,140 at the middle, $72,090 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $52,130, a ratio of 2.5 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

The state spread for Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants runs from the $101,170 median in District of Columbia down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (23,960 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants stands number 199 by employment and number 477 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 13% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 17 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $54,140, 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 14,530 jobs, 9.4% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $34,620 a year, against $101,900 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,512 a month before tax, $2,082 biweekly, $1,041 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($42,720) to the 75th ($72,090) is worth $29,370 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 $59,554 would sit between the median ($54,140) and the 75th percentile ($72,090), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $42,720, is $11,420 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance, Office and Administrative Support Workers, All Other, Loan Interviewers and Clerks, Court, Municipal, and License Clerks, Bill and Account Collectors, Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.