Tax Preparers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Tax Preparers worker at that point in the distribution, so $75,590 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

BLS counted 73,570 Tax Preparers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.05% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Oklahoma, where the location quotient is 2.09, meaning the occupation holds 2.09 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 10,700 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 32.0% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $37,750 at the 25th percentile, $50,560 at the middle, $75,590 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $65,740, a ratio of 3.2 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 Tax Preparers runs from the $77,010 median in Alaska down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (10,700 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Tax Preparers stands number 317 by employment and number 511 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 36% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 20 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $50,560, 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 6,870 jobs, 9.3% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Tulsa, OK posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $46,470 a year, against $80,370 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Tax Preparers paycheck, gross, is $1,945 every two weeks on an annual $50,560, which is $4,213 a month and $972 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,750) to the 75th ($75,590) is worth $37,840 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 $55,616 would sit between the median ($50,560) and the 75th percentile ($75,590), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,750, is $12,810 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Project Management Specialists, Human Resources Specialists, Management Analysts, Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, Buyers and Purchasing Agents, Training and Development Specialists. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.