Sales and Related Workers, All Other 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 ($28,060) to the 90th ($95,850). 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

The occupation employed 99,070 people in May 2024, 0.06% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 29,120 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 50.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Colorado, whose location quotient of 3.54 says this work is 3.54 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $35,040 at the 25th percentile, $46,370 at the middle, $66,240 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $67,790, a ratio of 3.4 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 29,120 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $72,840. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Sales and Related Workers, All Other stands number 271 by employment and number 614 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 18% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 16 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,370, 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 11,810 jobs, 11.9% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 215 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $37,740 a year, against $89,520 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

The median Sales and Related Workers, All Other paycheck, gross, is $1,783 every two weeks on an annual $46,370, which is $3,864 a month and $892 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,040) to the 75th ($66,240) is worth $31,200 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $51,007 would sit between the median ($46,370) and the 75th percentile ($66,240), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,040, is $11,330 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: Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products, Parts Salespersons, First-Line Supervisors of Non-Retail Sales Workers, Real Estate Sales Agents, Advertising Sales Agents, Telemarketers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.