Art Directors
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. Massachusetts pays art directors best, at $149,320. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $98,099 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for art directors is also the real leader: Massachusetts at $149,320, holding through tax and through price deflation to $98,099. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$114,850
People doing it
53,070
Highest paid
$149,320
MA
Best off, really
$98,099
MA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$64,900
Highest tenth
$213,050
Lowest, really
$52,992
KS
States with data
46
National average
$129,440
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.24%
MA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $52,992 to $98,099.
- This is a small job: about 53,070 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 46 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $114,850. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Massachusetts pays most.
- Interstate variation in art directors pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $52,992 to $98,099, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 53,070 workers, art directors is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for art directors in 46 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Art Directors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $64,900 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $114,850 |
| Top tenth earn over | $213,050 |
| This salary | $114,850 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Art Directors
The national median for this job
$114,850around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $64,900 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $114,850 |
| Top tenth | $213,050 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Art Directors, state by state
The national median for this job
46states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Kansas · $60,460 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Massachusetts · $149,320 |
| Spread | $88,860 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $88,270 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $90,836 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| MA | $149,320 | $106,180 | $98,099 |
| VT | $129,260 | $93,175 | $96,420 |
| NH | $132,000 | $101,488 | $96,339 |
| NY | $137,320 | $97,725 | $90,801 |
| OR | $133,840 | $91,515 | $87,389 |
| IN | $105,690 | $80,095 | $86,886 |
| WA | $121,170 | $94,073 | $86,654 |
| CA | $137,780 | $96,717 | $85,909 |
| NJ | $129,200 | $93,534 | $85,903 |
| GA | $110,430 | $81,606 | $84,392 |
| UT | $106,500 | $79,014 | $83,170 |
| MO | $100,940 | $76,034 | $82,860 |
| MN | $109,700 | $80,068 | $81,356 |
| NV | $98,070 | $77,822 | $80,246 |
| OH | $94,390 | $73,354 | $79,896 |
| TN | $89,860 | $72,047 | $77,875 |
| IL | $103,550 | $76,696 | $77,585 |
| FL | $99,660 | $78,941 | $76,307 |
| PA | $97,450 | $74,394 | $76,302 |
| ME | $100,300 | $73,862 | $76,070 |
| ND | $83,170 | $66,977 | $75,619 |
| CO | $99,990 | $75,482 | $74,453 |
| VA | $101,150 | $74,934 | $74,376 |
| LA | $83,640 | $65,548 | $74,195 |
| NC | $90,000 | $69,063 | $73,362 |
| TX | $88,270 | $70,928 | $72,990 |
| SC | $87,990 | $67,213 | $72,134 |
| IA | $80,940 | $63,307 | $71,319 |
| MD | $98,400 | $73,744 | $70,932 |
| OK | $80,680 | $62,458 | $70,745 |
| MI | $86,660 | $66,363 | $70,461 |
| ID | $80,680 | $62,166 | $67,996 |
| WI | $81,130 | $62,543 | $67,181 |
| AL | $77,220 | $59,866 | $66,540 |
| KY | $76,160 | $59,861 | $66,168 |
| AR | $71,930 | $57,230 | $66,156 |
| MT | $73,850 | $57,972 | $64,239 |
| NE | $73,270 | $57,745 | $63,894 |
| SD | $66,610 | $55,690 | $63,216 |
| HI | $89,300 | $66,309 | $61,053 |
| AK | $75,200 | $61,733 | $60,692 |
| MS | $66,020 | $52,678 | $60,347 |
| WV | $63,550 | $51,221 | $57,057 |
| RI | $72,550 | $57,568 | $56,767 |
| CT | $71,900 | $56,207 | $54,207 |
| KS | $60,460 | $47,675 | $52,992 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for art directors as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $114,850, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- Take-home figures for art directors assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Massachusetts, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $106,180.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for art directors. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Kansas, on $52,992.
- These are distribution medians for art directors, with a national value of $114,850. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for art directors assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $106,180, in Massachusetts. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for art directors rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Kansas anchors the distribution at $52,992. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.