Office Clerks, General 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 ($29,120) to the 90th ($63,840). 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

The occupation employed 2,510,550 people in May 2024, 1.63% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 306,000 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 27.8% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Idaho, whose location quotient of 1.63 says this work is 1.63 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $35,350 at the 25th percentile, $43,630 at the middle, $52,560 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $34,720, a ratio of 2.2 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

Colorado posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $56,150, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Office Clerks, General stands number 10 by employment and number 658 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 9% less than its group median, and it supplies 13.8% 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 $43,630, 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 137,660 jobs, 5.5% 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, Aguadilla, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $23,780 a year, against $62,700 in Boulder, CO. 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

The median annual wage of $43,630 works out to $3,636 a month before taxes, $1,678 per biweekly paycheck, and $839 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,350) to the 75th ($52,560) is worth $17,210 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $47,993 would sit between the median ($43,630) and the 75th percentile ($52,560), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,350, is $8,280 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance, Office and Administrative Support Workers, All Other, Loan Interviewers and Clerks, Court, Municipal, and License Clerks, Bill and Account Collectors, Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan. The full directory is on the Careers hub.