Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants worker at that point in the distribution, so $49,720 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 830,760 Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants jobs in May 2024, which is 0.54% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Delaware, where the location quotient is 2.02, meaning the occupation holds 2.02 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 116,890 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 32.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $37,880 at the 25th percentile, $44,640 at the middle, $49,720 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $25,000, a ratio of 1.7 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 116,890 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $56,920. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants stands number 43 by employment and number 648 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 7% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.6% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 21 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $44,640, 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 45,160 jobs, 5.4% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 391 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Ponce, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $21,570 a year, against $67,010 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $44,640 a year is $3,720 a month gross, $1,717 every two weeks, $858 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,880) to the 75th ($49,720) is worth $11,840 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 $3,720 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 $49,104 would sit between the median ($44,640) and the 75th percentile ($49,720), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,880, is $6,760 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants, Billing and Posting Clerks, Production, Planning, and Expediting Clerks, Tellers, Postal Service Mail Carriers, Hotel, Motel, and Resort Desk Clerks. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.