Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers offer sit among all 48,170 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

With 48,170 jobs nationally, Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers make up 0.03% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Florida alone holds 6,110 of those jobs, the top three states hold 32.8%, and the deepest concentration sits in Wyoming (location quotient 3.41, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $45,020 at the 25th percentile, $54,980 at the middle, $70,290 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $50,530, 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

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $77,780, and Florida the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers stands number 394 by employment and number 467 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Legal Occupations, the group median wage is $68,760 across 8 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 20% less than its group median, and it supplies 3.8% of the group's 1,273,410 jobs. In 19 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $54,980, 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

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,600 jobs, 3.3% 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, St. Louis, MO-IL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $50,950 a year, against $79,690 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, 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 Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers paycheck, gross, is $2,115 every two weeks on an annual $54,980, which is $4,582 a month and $1,057 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($45,020) to the 75th ($70,290) is worth $25,270 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 $60,478 would sit between the median ($54,980) and the 75th percentile ($70,290), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $45,020, is $9,960 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Legal Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Paralegals and Legal Assistants, Legal Support Workers, All Other, Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates, Administrative Law Judges, Adjudicators, and Hearing Officers, Judicial Law Clerks, Arbitrators, Mediators, and Conciliators. The full directory is on the Careers hub.