Models Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($38,010) to the 90th ($124,380). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

With 5,350 jobs nationally, Models make up 0.00% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 880 of those jobs, the top three states hold 25.2%, and the deepest concentration sits in Ohio (location quotient 1.82, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $86,370 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($124,380) is 3.3 times the 10th percentile ($38,010), a gap of $86,370 a year. The mean of $81,540 sitting near the median of $89,990 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, 13 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $89,990; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Models stands number 754 by employment and number 164 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Sales and Related Occupations, the group median wage is $56,320 across 22 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 60% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.0% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 0 of the 12 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $89,990, 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 600 jobs, 11.2% 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, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $91,650 a year, against $91,650 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, 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

As a household number, $89,990 a year is $7,499 a month gross, $3,461 every two weeks, $1,731 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($45,760) to the 75th ($89,990) is worth $44,230 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 $7,499 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 $98,989 would sit between the median ($89,990) and the 75th percentile ($89,990), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $45,760, is $44,230 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Sales and Related Occupations

Sibling occupations in Sales and Related Occupations: Advertising Sales Agents, Telemarketers, Demonstrators and Product Promoters, Travel Agents, Sales Engineers, Real Estate Brokers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.