Nursing Assistants 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 ($31,390) to the 90th ($50,140). 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

May 2024 employment stood at 1,388,430, or 0.90% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 102,380 jobs; the top three states sum to 20.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Rhode Island posts a location quotient of 1.90, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $18,750 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($50,140) is 1.6 times the 10th percentile ($31,390), a gap of $18,750 a year. The mean of $41,270 sitting above the median of $39,530 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 102,380 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Oregon would lead at $48,390. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Nursing Assistants stands number 23 by employment and number 712 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Support Occupations, the group median wage is $41,590 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 5% less than its group median, and it supplies 18.6% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $39,530, 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 77,360 jobs, 5.6% 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, Dothan, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $28,280 a year, against $58,190 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: $3,294 a month before tax, $1,520 biweekly, $760 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,260) to the 75th ($46,070) is worth $9,810 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 $43,483 would sit between the median ($39,530) and the 75th percentile ($46,070), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,260, is $3,270 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 Support Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Home Health and Personal Care Aides, Medical Assistants, Dental Assistants, Phlebotomists, Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers, Physical Therapist Assistants. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.