Psychiatric Aides 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 ($30,920) to the 90th ($58,530). 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 34,900, or 0.02% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 5,330 jobs; the top three states sum to 30.5% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Mississippi posts a location quotient of 9.47, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $27,610 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($58,530) is 1.9 times the 10th percentile ($30,920), a gap of $27,610 a year. The mean of $43,610 sitting above the median of $41,590 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, 41 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New Hampshire at $55,690; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Psychiatric Aides stands number 455 by employment and number 678 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Support Occupations, the group median wage is $41,590 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 20 of the 39 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $41,590, 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, 13.6% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Jackson, MS posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $31,690 a year, against $50,010 in Salem, OR. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $41,590 a year is $3,466 a month gross, $1,600 every two weeks, $800 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,930) to the 75th ($48,770) is worth $12,840 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 $3,466 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 $45,749 would sit between the median ($41,590) and the 75th percentile ($48,770), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,930, is $5,660 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Support Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Support Occupations: Medical Equipment Preparers, Orderlies, Occupational Therapy Assistants, Physical Therapist Aides, Medical Transcriptionists, Pharmacy Aides. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.