Broadcast Technicians
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays broadcast technicians the most, at $108,270. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $71,084 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- The District of Columbia leads for broadcast technicians at $108,270 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $71,084 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
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
$59,570
People doing it
21,110
Highest paid
$108,270
DC
Best off, really
$71,084
DC, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$31,390
Highest tenth
$123,670
Lowest, really
$26,130
WV
States with data
47
National average
$67,960
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
110.8%
DC, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $26,130 up to $71,084.
- Only 21,110 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 47 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $59,570. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, The District of Columbia pays most.
- The nominal spread for broadcast technicians approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $26,130 to $71,084, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in broadcast technicians is 21,110. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for broadcast technicians in 47 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: Broadcast Technicians
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $31,390 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $59,570 |
| Top tenth earn over | $123,670 |
| This salary | $59,570 |
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 Technicians
The national median for this job
$59,570around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $31,390 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $59,570 |
| Top tenth | $123,670 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Broadcast Technicians, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $27,310 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $108,270 |
| Spread | $80,960 |
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 | $49,440 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $50,877 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC | $108,270 | $78,763 | $71,084 |
| PA | $80,470 | $62,970 | $64,585 |
| NH | $81,150 | $65,919 | $62,574 |
| NV | $73,070 | $60,235 | $62,110 |
| IL | $74,210 | $57,508 | $58,174 |
| AZ | $73,040 | $58,790 | $58,148 |
| CO | $74,040 | $58,368 | $57,572 |
| NY | $78,840 | $60,634 | $56,337 |
| WI | $62,400 | $50,069 | $53,781 |
| FL | $64,950 | $54,367 | $52,553 |
| CA | $72,800 | $57,293 | $50,891 |
| MD | $64,030 | $50,950 | $49,007 |
| WA | $62,070 | $52,053 | $47,948 |
| ND | $48,090 | $40,820 | $46,087 |
| VA | $57,940 | $46,164 | $45,821 |
| NM | $49,990 | $41,163 | $45,541 |
| ME | $55,110 | $44,061 | $45,378 |
| CT | $58,930 | $47,039 | $45,366 |
| OH | $48,720 | $40,703 | $44,333 |
| IA | $46,820 | $38,633 | $43,521 |
| TN | $47,340 | $40,218 | $43,472 |
| TX | $49,440 | $41,905 | $43,123 |
| AL | $47,290 | $38,153 | $42,406 |
| MT | $46,600 | $38,190 | $42,318 |
| SC | $46,860 | $39,041 | $41,899 |
| LA | $44,440 | $36,941 | $41,814 |
| NC | $47,780 | $39,174 | $41,612 |
| OK | $44,530 | $36,457 | $41,294 |
| MI | $47,730 | $38,753 | $41,146 |
| AR | $41,870 | $34,732 | $40,149 |
| ID | $44,730 | $36,603 | $40,036 |
| RI | $49,580 | $40,578 | $40,013 |
| NE | $43,680 | $35,993 | $39,826 |
| GA | $47,340 | $38,454 | $39,767 |
| IN | $44,400 | $36,575 | $39,676 |
| MN | $46,790 | $38,091 | $38,704 |
| MO | $41,600 | $34,588 | $37,693 |
| KS | $41,600 | $33,573 | $37,318 |
| WY | $39,380 | $33,822 | $37,229 |
| KY | $40,240 | $33,222 | $36,722 |
| HI | $49,200 | $39,403 | $36,280 |
| MA | $47,260 | $38,110 | $35,210 |
| OR | $44,420 | $34,535 | $32,978 |
| SD | $32,150 | $28,013 | $31,798 |
| UT | $31,490 | $26,081 | $27,453 |
| MS | $27,750 | $23,444 | $26,857 |
| WV | $27,310 | $23,457 | $26,130 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of broadcast technicians earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $59,570.
- Take-home figures for broadcast technicians 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $78,763.
- The price adjustment for broadcast technicians uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — West Virginia anchors the bottom at $26,130. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for broadcast technicians, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $59,570, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for broadcast technicians 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 $78,763, in the District of Columbia. 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 figures for broadcast technicians deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.