Transportation Security Screeners Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Transportation Security Screeners worker at that point in the distribution, so $69,990 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 46,340 Transportation Security Screeners jobs in May 2024, which is 0.03% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Hawaii, where the location quotient is 5.28, meaning the occupation holds 5.28 times its national share of local jobs. Florida employs the most people outright, 5,890 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 32.6% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $45,010 or less, and one in ten earns $75,940 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.7 to 1 and the annual gap is $30,930. The mean ($61,840) versus median ($63,360) comparison shows an unusually symmetric ladder in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 47 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New Hampshire at $72,240; the jobs leader is Florida:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Transportation Security Screeners stands number 403 by employment and number 355 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Protective Service Occupations, the group median wage is $58,610 across 24 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 8% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.3% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 15 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $63,360, 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 3,780 jobs, 8.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 141 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, $56,590 a year, against $70,880 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

As a household number, $63,360 a year is $5,280 a month gross, $2,437 every two weeks, $1,218 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($52,210) to the 75th ($69,990) is worth $17,780 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $5,280 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $69,696 would sit between the median ($63,360) and the 75th percentile ($69,990), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $52,210, is $11,150 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Protective Service Occupations

Sibling occupations in Protective Service Occupations: Crossing Guards and Flaggers, Protective Service Workers, All Other, School Bus Monitors, First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers, First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers, Private Detectives and Investigators. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.