Broadcast Announcers and Radio Disc Jockeys
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. New York pays this job best, at $81,310. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $57,828 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys is also the real leader: New York at $81,310, holding through tax and through price deflation to $57,828. 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
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$47,340
People doing it
21,240
Highest paid
$81,310
NY
Best off, really
$57,828
NY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$28,190
Highest tenth
$138,440
Lowest, really
$28,697
SC
States with data
47
National average
$78,720
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
107.63%
NY, 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 $28,697 to $57,828.
- This is a small job: about 21,240 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 47 jurisdictions have a figure, with $47,340 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. New York tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys 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 $28,697 to $57,828, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 21,240 workers, broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys 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.
- 47 jurisdictions carry a published median for broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Broadcast Announcers and Radio Disc Jockeys
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $28,190 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $47,340 |
| Top tenth earn over | $138,440 |
| This salary | $47,340 |
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 Broadcast Announcers and Radio Disc Jockeys
The national median for this job
$47,340around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $28,190 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $47,340 |
| Top tenth | $138,440 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Broadcast Announcers and Radio Disc Jockeys, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | South Carolina · $30,960 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New York · $81,310 |
| Spread | $50,350 |
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 | $49,050 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $50,476 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NY | $81,310 | $62,238 | $57,828 |
| MD | $74,480 | $58,053 | $55,839 |
| IN | $61,760 | $50,012 | $54,252 |
| NV | $60,460 | $50,760 | $52,340 |
| NJ | $70,800 | $56,274 | $51,683 |
| FL | $56,360 | $47,465 | $45,881 |
| TN | $48,290 | $40,981 | $44,297 |
| MA | $60,200 | $47,861 | $44,218 |
| RI | $55,110 | $44,814 | $44,190 |
| PA | $52,080 | $42,427 | $43,515 |
| TX | $49,050 | $41,592 | $42,801 |
| ID | $46,940 | $38,262 | $41,850 |
| NC | $47,910 | $39,273 | $41,718 |
| NE | $45,020 | $37,009 | $40,950 |
| MO | $45,460 | $37,508 | $40,875 |
| CO | $50,660 | $41,365 | $40,801 |
| MI | $46,640 | $37,924 | $40,266 |
| SD | $40,630 | $34,826 | $39,533 |
| AZ | $47,930 | $39,896 | $39,460 |
| UT | $46,080 | $37,155 | $39,109 |
| OH | $42,440 | $35,830 | $39,025 |
| IL | $46,720 | $37,552 | $37,987 |
| AK | $44,790 | $38,169 | $37,525 |
| HI | $51,030 | $40,742 | $37,513 |
| ND | $38,500 | $33,115 | $37,387 |
| NH | $46,000 | $39,141 | $37,155 |
| ME | $44,000 | $35,884 | $36,957 |
| NM | $38,940 | $32,761 | $36,246 |
| MN | $43,530 | $35,646 | $36,219 |
| WI | $40,630 | $33,677 | $36,174 |
| VA | $44,400 | $36,063 | $35,795 |
| GA | $42,020 | $34,445 | $35,621 |
| IA | $37,090 | $31,184 | $35,130 |
| AR | $36,160 | $30,355 | $35,090 |
| AL | $38,530 | $31,500 | $35,011 |
| WY | $36,760 | $31,717 | $34,912 |
| WA | $44,420 | $37,871 | $34,885 |
| OR | $46,190 | $35,802 | $34,188 |
| OK | $36,110 | $30,070 | $34,060 |
| KY | $36,170 | $30,094 | $33,265 |
| WV | $35,400 | $29,726 | $33,113 |
| MT | $35,000 | $29,414 | $32,594 |
| MS | $34,040 | $28,262 | $32,376 |
| KS | $35,130 | $28,735 | $31,940 |
| LA | $33,020 | $28,107 | $31,815 |
| VT | $35,220 | $29,556 | $30,585 |
| SC | $30,960 | $26,739 | $28,697 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $47,340, 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.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for this job, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is New York, at $62,238.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. 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 South Carolina, on $28,697.
- These are distribution medians for broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys, with a national value of $47,340. 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.
- Retained-pay figures for broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $62,238, which leads in New York.
- Real-terms results for broadcast announcers and radio disc jockeys 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; South Carolina anchors the distribution at $28,697. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.