Word Processors and Typists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Word Processors and Typists worker at that point in the distribution, so $56,000 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

The occupation employed 36,030 people in May 2024, 0.02% of every job BLS counted. New York is the largest employer at 12,870 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 72.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in New York, whose location quotient of 5.77 says this work is 5.77 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $39,740 at the 25th percentile, $47,850 at the middle, $56,000 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $29,070, a ratio of 1.8 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts New York first at 12,870 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Colorado would lead at $56,700. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Word Processors and Typists stands number 451 by employment and number 574 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 14 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $47,850, 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 8,420 jobs, 23.4% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $33,780 a year, against $56,030 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,988 a month before tax, $1,840 biweekly, $920 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($39,740) to the 75th ($56,000) is worth $16,260 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 $52,635 would sit between the median ($47,850) and the 75th percentile ($56,000), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $39,740, is $8,110 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Cargo and Freight Agents, Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping, Order Clerks, Library Assistants, Clerical, File Clerks, Postal Service Clerks. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.