Postal Service Clerks 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 ($42,600) to the 90th ($74,050). 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 78,060 people in May 2024, 0.05% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 6,890 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 22.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Vermont, whose location quotient of 2.75 says this work is 2.75 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $31,450 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($74,050) is 1.7 times the 10th percentile ($42,600), a gap of $31,450 a year. The mean of $61,070 sitting near the median of $61,630 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $65,770; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Postal Service Clerks stands number 309 by employment and number 382 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 29% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 12 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $61,630, 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 4,760 jobs, 6.1% 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, Pittsburgh, PA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $59,890 a year, against $66,090 in Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI. 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

The median annual wage of $61,630 works out to $5,136 a month before taxes, $2,370 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,185 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($55,410) to the 75th ($74,050) is worth $18,640 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 $67,793 would sit between the median ($61,630) and the 75th percentile ($74,050), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $55,410, is $6,220 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

Sibling occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations: Mail Clerks and Mail Machine Operators, Except Postal Service, Procurement Clerks, Weighers, Measurers, Checkers, and Samplers, Recordkeeping, Brokerage Clerks, New Accounts Clerks, Financial Clerks, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.