Retail Salespersons 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 ($25,600) to the 90th ($47,930). 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 3,800,250, or 2.46% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 352,860 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.5% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Florida posts a location quotient of 1.35, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $25,600 or less, and one in ten earns $47,930 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.9 to 1 and the annual gap is $22,330. The mean ($37,150) versus median ($34,580) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 352,860 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $38,350. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Retail Salespersons stands number 2 by employment and number 798 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 39% less than its group median, and it supplies 28.5% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $34,580, 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 212,470 jobs, 5.6% 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, Guayama, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $22,080 a year, against $48,030 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

The median annual wage of $34,580 works out to $2,882 a month before taxes, $1,330 per biweekly paycheck, and $665 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($29,140) to the 75th ($37,850) is worth $8,710 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 $38,038 would sit between the median ($34,580) and the 75th percentile ($37,850), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $29,140, is $5,440 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: Telemarketers, Demonstrators and Product Promoters, Travel Agents, Sales Engineers, Real Estate Brokers, Gambling Change Persons and Booth Cashiers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.