Umpires, Referees, and Other Sports Officials 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 Umpires, Referees, and Other Sports Officials ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $30,920. 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

With 15,080 jobs nationally, Umpires, Referees, and Other Sports Officials make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 2,830 of those jobs, the top three states hold 31.2%, and the deepest concentration sits in Utah (location quotient 5.75, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $93,180, which is 3.7 times the $25,070 at the 10th, a difference of $68,110 annually. Because the mean wage ($52,800) sits above the median ($38,820), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 2,830 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Massachusetts would lead at $83,570. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Umpires, Referees, and Other Sports Officials stands number 606 by employment and number 722 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 41% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 19 of the 40 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $38,820, 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 850 jobs, 5.6% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $56,990 a year, against $68,300 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Umpires, Referees, and Other Sports Officials paycheck, gross, is $1,493 every two weeks on an annual $38,820, which is $3,235 a month and $747 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($30,920) to the 75th ($53,560) is worth $22,640 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 $42,702 would sit between the median ($38,820) and the 75th percentile ($53,560), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $30,920, is $7,900 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Music Directors and Composers, Set and Exhibit Designers, Lighting Technicians, Fine Artists, Including Painters, Sculptors, and Illustrators, Designers, All Other, Artists and Related Workers, All Other. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.