Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists 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 ($45,390) to the 90th ($106,290). 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

BLS counted 86,820 Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.06% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Alaska, where the location quotient is 2.53, meaning the occupation holds 2.53 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 12,950 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 28.6% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $106,290, which is 2.3 times the $45,390 at the 10th, a difference of $60,900 annually. Because the mean wage ($71,530) sits above the median ($64,520), 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, 48 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $107,050; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists stands number 291 by employment and number 339 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Community and Social Service Occupations, the group median wage is $59,190 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 9% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.4% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 23 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $64,520, 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 4,360 jobs, 5.0% 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, San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $50,850 a year, against $133,620 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

As a household number, $64,520 a year is $5,377 a month gross, $2,482 every two weeks, $1,241 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($52,580) to the 75th ($84,030) is worth $31,450 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $5,377 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $70,972 would sit between the median ($64,520) and the 75th percentile ($84,030), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $52,580, is $11,940 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Community and Social Service Occupations

Sibling occupations in Community and Social Service Occupations: Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors, Healthcare Social Workers, Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers, Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other, Rehabilitation Counselors, Marriage and Family Therapists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.