Training and Development Specialists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Training and Development Specialists worker at that point in the distribution, so $91,550 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 436,610, or 0.28% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 44,750 jobs; the top three states sum to 27.1% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: North Carolina posts a location quotient of 1.40, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $37,510 or less, and one in ten earns $120,190 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 3.2 to 1 and the annual gap is $82,680. The mean ($73,760) versus median ($65,850) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $84,460; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Training and Development Specialists stands number 83 by employment and number 321 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 16% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.2% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 21 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $65,850, 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 21,340 jobs, 4.9% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 389 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $45,030 a year, against $108,710 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

The median Training and Development Specialists paycheck, gross, is $2,533 every two weeks on an annual $65,850, which is $5,488 a month and $1,266 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,900) to the 75th ($91,550) is worth $42,650 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 $72,435 would sit between the median ($65,850) and the 75th percentile ($91,550), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,900, is $16,950 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

Sibling occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations: Financial Specialists, All Other, Insurance Underwriters, Fundraisers, Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists, Tax Preparers, Credit Analysts. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.