Librarians and Media Collections Specialists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Librarians and Media Collections Specialists worker at that point in the distribution, so $80,640 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

BLS counted 131,830 Librarians and Media Collections Specialists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.09% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Vermont, where the location quotient is 2.24, meaning the occupation holds 2.24 times its national share of local jobs. New York employs the most people outright, 11,020 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 23.1% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $38,920 or less, and one in ten earns $100,880 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.6 to 1 and the annual gap is $61,960. The mean ($69,180) versus median ($64,320) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

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 Washington at $94,400; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Librarians and Media Collections Specialists stands number 227 by employment and number 340 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Educational Instruction and Library Occupations, the group median wage is $76,210 across 64 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 16% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.5% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 18 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $64,320, 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 9,570 jobs, 7.3% 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, $50,230 a year, against $100,610 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 Librarians and Media Collections Specialists paycheck, gross, is $2,474 every two weeks on an annual $64,320, which is $5,360 a month and $1,237 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($50,920) to the 75th ($80,640) is worth $29,720 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 $70,752 would sit between the median ($64,320) and the 75th percentile ($80,640), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $50,920, is $13,400 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Educational Instruction and Library Occupations

Sibling occupations in Educational Instruction and Library Occupations: Self-Enrichment Teachers, Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten and Elementary School, Health Specialties Teachers, Postsecondary, Instructional Coordinators, Tutors, Special Education Teachers, Secondary School. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.