Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $56,220. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 861,140 Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.56% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Colorado, where the location quotient is 1.86, meaning the occupation holds 1.86 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 108,460 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 28.4% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $56,220 at the 25th percentile, $76,950 at the middle, $104,870 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $102,540, a ratio of 3.4 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 108,460 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Delaware would lead at $98,650. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists stands number 40 by employment and number 241 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 2% less than its group median, and it supplies 8.3% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 14 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $76,950, 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 75,190 jobs, 8.7% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $44,450 a year, against $146,850 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: $6,412 a month before tax, $2,960 biweekly, $1,480 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($56,220) to the 75th ($104,870) is worth $48,650 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 $84,645 would sit between the median ($76,950) and the 75th percentile ($104,870), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $56,220, is $20,730 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Management Analysts, Buyers and Purchasing Agents, Training and Development Specialists, Compliance Officers, Financial and Investment Analysts, Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.