Real Estate Sales Agents Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Real Estate Sales Agents worker at that point in the distribution, so $85,440 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 190,600, or 0.12% of the U.S. total. Florida leads the state table with 24,440 jobs; the top three states sum to 35.7% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Utah posts a location quotient of 2.42, 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: $93,200 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($125,140) is 3.9 times the 10th percentile ($31,940), a gap of $93,200 a year. The mean of $70,970 sitting above the median of $56,320 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Florida first at 24,440 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New York would lead at $97,440. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Real Estate Sales Agents stands number 167 by employment and number 456 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Sales and Related Occupations, the group median wage is $56,320 across 22 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.4% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 14 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $56,320, 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 9,840 jobs, 5.2% 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, Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $46,180 a year, against $105,920 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

The median annual wage of $56,320 works out to $4,693 a month before taxes, $2,166 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,083 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,940) to the 75th ($85,440) is worth $46,500 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 $61,952 would sit between the median ($56,320) and the 75th percentile ($85,440), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,940, is $17,380 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Sales and Related Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Demonstrators and Product Promoters, Travel Agents, Sales Engineers, Real Estate Brokers, Gambling Change Persons and Booth Cashiers, Models. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.