Set and Exhibit Designers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Set and Exhibit Designers offer sit among all 10,850 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

BLS counted 10,850 Set and Exhibit Designers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in District of Columbia, where the location quotient is 5.14, meaning the occupation holds 5.14 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 2,770 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 45.3% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $48,920 at the 25th percentile, $66,280 at the middle, $100,020 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $93,430, a ratio of 3.6 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 2,770 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $100,020. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Set and Exhibit Designers stands number 677 by employment and number 317 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations, the group median wage is $66,220 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 6 of the 34 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $66,280, 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 2,080 jobs, 19.2% 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, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $106,180 a year, against $107,890 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, 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 $66,280 works out to $5,523 a month before taxes, $2,549 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,275 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,920) to the 75th ($100,020) is worth $51,100 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 $72,908 would sit between the median ($66,280) and the 75th percentile ($100,020), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,920, is $17,360 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Music Directors and Composers, Lighting Technicians, Fine Artists, Including Painters, Sculptors, and Illustrators, Designers, All Other, Artists and Related Workers, All Other, Craft Artists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.