Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive offer sit among all 1,737,820 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 1,737,820, or 1.13% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 169,670 jobs; the top three states sum to 25.8% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: New Mexico posts a location quotient of 2.53, 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 $31,600 or less, and one in ten earns $64,150 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.0 to 1 and the annual gap is $32,550. The mean ($47,640) versus median ($46,290) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

The state spread for Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive runs from the $55,800 median in District of Columbia down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (169,670 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive stands number 14 by employment and number 615 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 3% less than its group median, and it supplies 9.5% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 18 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,290, 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 122,270 jobs, 7.0% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 393 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, Aguadilla, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $24,070 a year, against $64,970 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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 Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive paycheck, gross, is $1,780 every two weeks on an annual $46,290, which is $3,858 a month and $890 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,770) to the 75th ($55,650) is worth $17,880 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 $50,919 would sit between the median ($46,290) and the 75th percentile ($55,650), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,770, is $8,520 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance, Office and Administrative Support Workers, All Other, Loan Interviewers and Clerks, Court, Municipal, and License Clerks, Bill and Account Collectors, Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.