Library Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Library Technicians worker at that point in the distribution, so $49,740 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 73,770 Library Technicians jobs in May 2024, which is 0.05% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in South Dakota, where the location quotient is 2.32, meaning the occupation holds 2.32 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 7,760 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 24.4% of the national total.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $33,070 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($60,960) is 2.2 times the 10th percentile ($27,890), a gap of $33,070 a year. The mean of $43,050 sitting above the median of $39,970 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

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 District of Columbia at $58,780; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Library Technicians stands number 316 by employment and number 704 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 48% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 8,947,690 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $39,970, 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 3,180 jobs, 4.3% 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, Madison, WI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $34,410 a year, against $68,990 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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

The median annual wage of $39,970 works out to $3,331 a month before taxes, $1,537 per biweekly paycheck, and $769 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($33,510) to the 75th ($49,740) is worth $16,230 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 $43,967 would sit between the median ($39,970) and the 75th percentile ($49,740), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $33,510, is $6,460 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: Special Education Teachers, Preschool, Law Teachers, Postsecondary, Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary, Philosophy and Religion Teachers, Postsecondary, Chemistry Teachers, Postsecondary, History Teachers, Postsecondary. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.