Technical Writers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Technical Writers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $68,640. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 55,530 Technical Writers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.04% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Rhode Island, where the location quotient is 2.31, meaning the occupation holds 2.31 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 13,210 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 35.1% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $68,640 at the 25th percentile, $91,670 at the middle, $102,740 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $76,030, a ratio of 2.4 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

Connecticut posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $109,400, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Technical Writers stands number 372 by employment and number 160 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 38% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.8% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 8 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $91,670, 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 8,600 jobs, 15.5% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 158 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, Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $80,190 a year, against $146,930 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $7,639 a month before tax, $3,526 biweekly, $1,763 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($68,640) to the 75th ($102,740) is worth $34,100 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $100,837 would sit between the median ($91,670) and the 75th percentile ($102,740), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $68,640, is $23,030 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Photographers, Art Directors, Writers and Authors, News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, Floral Designers, Commercial and Industrial Designers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.