Protective Service Workers, All Other Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Protective Service Workers, All Other offer sit among all 83,110 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 83,110 jobs nationally, Protective Service Workers, All Other make up 0.05% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 23,390 of those jobs, the top three states hold 41.5%, and the deepest concentration sits in Colorado (location quotient 3.22, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $35,540 at the 25th percentile, $41,600 at the middle, $54,310 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $42,050, a ratio of 2.4 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

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 $84,360; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Protective Service Workers, All Other stands number 296 by employment and number 675 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Protective Service Occupations, the group median wage is $58,610 across 24 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 29% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.3% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 36 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $41,600, 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 6,930 jobs, 8.3% 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, McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $28,060 a year, against $77,220 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. 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

The median annual wage of $41,600 works out to $3,467 a month before taxes, $1,600 per biweekly paycheck, and $800 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,540) to the 75th ($54,310) is worth $18,770 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 $45,760 would sit between the median ($41,600) and the 75th percentile ($54,310), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,540, is $6,060 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Protective Service Occupations

Sibling occupations in Protective Service Occupations: First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers, Transportation Security Screeners, Private Detectives and Investigators, First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other, Bailiffs, Fire Inspectors and Investigators. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.