Personal Financial Advisors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Personal Financial Advisors offer sit among all 270,480 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

With 270,480 jobs nationally, Personal Financial Advisors make up 0.18% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 34,070 of those jobs, the top three states hold 31.1%, and the deepest concentration sits in New York (location quotient 1.72, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $102,140 and the mean of $160,210. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 50 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 34,070 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New York would lead at $167,970. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Personal Financial Advisors stands number 132 by employment and number 110 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 30% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.6% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 12 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $102,140, 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 28,950 jobs, 10.7% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Tucson, AZ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $82,560 a year, against $230,810 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $8,512 a month before tax, $3,928 biweekly, $1,964 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($70,620) to the 75th ($172,540) is worth $101,920 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 $112,354 would sit between the median ($102,140) and the 75th percentile ($172,540), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $70,620, is $31,520 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists, Tax Preparers, Credit Analysts, Labor Relations Specialists, Financial Examiners, Property Appraisers and Assessors. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.