Marriage and Family Therapists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Marriage and Family Therapists worker at that point in the distribution, so $85,020 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

With 65,870 jobs nationally, Marriage and Family Therapists make up 0.04% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 32,070 of those jobs, the top three states hold 60.4%, and the deepest concentration sits in California (location quotient 4.16, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $48,600 at the 25th percentile, $63,780 at the middle, $85,020 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $69,000, a ratio of 2.6 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 32,070 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Hawaii would lead at $135,870. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Marriage and Family Therapists stands number 337 by employment and number 348 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Community and Social Service Occupations, the group median wage is $59,190 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 8% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.6% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 17 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $63,780, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 12,400 jobs, 18.8% 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, Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $47,570 a year, against $97,600 in Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA. 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

As a household number, $63,780 a year is $5,315 a month gross, $2,453 every two weeks, $1,227 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,600) to the 75th ($85,020) is worth $36,420 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 $5,315 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 $70,158 would sit between the median ($63,780) and the 75th percentile ($85,020), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,600, is $15,180 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Community and Social Service Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other, Rehabilitation Counselors, Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists, Health Education Specialists, Social Workers, All Other, Community Health Workers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.