Social and Human Service Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Social and Human Service Assistants offer sit among all 424,220 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 424,220 Social and Human Service Assistants jobs in May 2024, which is 0.28% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Maine, where the location quotient is 2.64, meaning the occupation holds 2.64 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 58,830 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 29.0% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $37,770 at the 25th percentile, $45,120 at the middle, $53,040 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $30,570, a ratio of 1.9 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

The state spread for Social and Human Service Assistants runs from the $57,210 median in District of Columbia down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (58,830 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Social and Human Service Assistants stands number 85 by employment and number 641 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 24% less than its group median, and it supplies 16.5% of the group's 2,569,640 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $45,120, 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 34,540 jobs, 8.1% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 392 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, Jackson, MS posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $32,340 a year, against $62,420 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

As a household number, $45,120 a year is $3,760 a month gross, $1,735 every two weeks, $868 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,770) to the 75th ($53,040) is worth $15,270 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 $3,760 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 $49,632 would sit between the median ($45,120) and the 75th percentile ($53,040), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,770, is $7,350 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists, Marriage and Family Therapists, Health Education Specialists, Social Workers, All Other, Community Health Workers, Clergy. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.