Medical Records Specialists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Medical Records Specialists offer sit among all 187,910 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

With 187,910 jobs nationally, Medical Records Specialists make up 0.12% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 20,390 of those jobs, the top three states hold 29.6%, and the deepest concentration sits in Alaska (location quotient 3.47, 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: $41,600 at the 25th percentile, $50,250 at the middle, $64,070 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $45,170, a ratio of 2.3 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 Medical Records Specialists runs from the $64,690 median in District of Columbia down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in Texas (20,390 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Medical Records Specialists stands number 169 by employment and number 517 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 49% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.0% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 24 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $50,250, 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 7,820 jobs, 4.2% 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, $27,820 a year, against $99,500 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,188 a month before tax, $1,933 biweekly, $966 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($41,600) to the 75th ($64,070) is worth $22,470 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 $55,275 would sit between the median ($50,250) and the 75th percentile ($64,070), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $41,600, is $8,650 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Pharmacists, Physicians, All Other, Nurse Practitioners, Physical Therapists, Radiologic Technologists and Technicians, Dental Hygienists. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.