Parts Salespersons 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 ($27,770) to the 90th ($61,750). 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 265,060, or 0.17% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 27,150 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.1% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: South Dakota posts a location quotient of 2.52, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $61,750, which is 2.2 times the $27,770 at the 10th, a difference of $33,980 annually. Because the mean wage ($42,390) sits above the median ($37,440), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is North Dakota at $52,000; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Parts Salespersons stands number 133 by employment and number 750 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 34% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.0% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 27 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $37,440, 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 8,580 jobs, 3.2% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

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, $22,850 a year, against $56,330 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,120 a month before tax, $1,440 biweekly, $720 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($30,630) to the 75th ($48,410) is worth $17,780 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 $41,184 would sit between the median ($37,440) and the 75th percentile ($48,410), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $30,630, is $6,810 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: Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel, First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers, Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents, Insurance Sales Agents, Counter and Rental Clerks, Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.