Rehabilitation Counselors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Rehabilitation Counselors ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $38,700. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 88,930, or 0.06% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 13,450 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.9% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Massachusetts posts a location quotient of 2.65, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $38,700 at the 25th percentile, $46,110 at the middle, $59,040 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $42,720, a ratio of 2.2 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 Alaska at $82,400; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Rehabilitation Counselors stands number 290 by employment and number 618 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 22% less than its group median, and it supplies 3.5% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 29 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,110, 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 4,750 jobs, 5.3% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 271 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Tulsa, OK posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $32,620 a year, against $65,420 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $46,110 a year is $3,842 a month gross, $1,773 every two weeks, $887 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,700) to the 75th ($59,040) is worth $20,340 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 $3,842 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 $50,721 would sit between the median ($46,110) and the 75th percentile ($59,040), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,700, is $7,410 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: Healthcare Social Workers, Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers, Community and Social Service Specialists, All Other, Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists, Marriage and Family Therapists, Health Education Specialists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.