Special Effects Artists and Animators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Special Effects Artists and Animators worker at that point in the distribution, so $135,600 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 21,280, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 7,690 jobs; the top three states sum to 56.5% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Washington posts a location quotient of 5.15, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $174,630, which is 3.1 times the $57,220 at the 10th, a difference of $117,410 annually. Because the mean wage ($110,110) sits above the median ($99,800), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 35 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $128,360; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Special Effects Artists and Animators stands number 544 by employment and number 128 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 51% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.1% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 4 of the 33 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $99,800, 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 4,780 jobs, 22.5% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 49 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, Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $77,170 a year, against $146,600 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. 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 Special Effects Artists and Animators paycheck, gross, is $3,838 every two weeks on an annual $99,800, which is $8,317 a month and $1,919 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($73,030) to the 75th ($135,600) is worth $62,570 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 $109,780 would sit between the median ($99,800) and the 75th percentile ($135,600), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $73,030, is $26,770 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

Sibling occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations: Fashion Designers, Umpires, Referees, and Other Sports Officials, Athletes and Sports Competitors, Sound Engineering Technicians, Media and Communication Equipment Workers, All Other, Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.