Budget Analysts
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for budget analysts is the District of Columbia, at $124,590. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Alabama comes out ahead, worth $82,988. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for budget analysts: the District of Columbia leads at $124,590 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Alabama to $82,988 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$91,640
People doing it
47,160
Highest paid
$124,590
DC
Best off, really
$82,988
AL, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$62,250
Highest tenth
$136,660
Lowest, really
$62,191
NY
States with data
51
National average
$96,370
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
89.97%
AL, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- The state you work in changes what this job pays, but less than you would expect. Level out tax and prices and the whole country sits between $62,191 and $82,988. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- Only 47,160 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $91,640. Nothing is missing.
- Interstate variation for budget analysts is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $62,191 to $82,988. A differential of this magnitude is real but rarely decisive on its own, which is worth stating plainly against wage tables that present nominal gaps without either adjustment.
- National employment in budget analysts is 47,160. ⚠️ 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.
- Coverage for budget analysts is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Budget Analysts
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $62,250 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $91,640 |
| Top tenth earn over | $136,660 |
| This salary | $91,640 |
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 Budget Analysts
The national median for this job
$91,640around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $62,250 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $91,640 |
| Top tenth | $136,660 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Budget Analysts, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $71,800 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $124,590 |
| Spread | $52,790 |
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 | $82,970 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $85,382 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AL | $99,490 | $74,665 | $82,988 |
| DC | $124,590 | $88,802 | $80,143 |
| MI | $96,430 | $72,821 | $77,318 |
| VA | $105,470 | $77,724 | $77,146 |
| OH | $89,840 | $70,278 | $76,546 |
| MD | $106,020 | $78,664 | $75,664 |
| IA | $86,550 | $67,041 | $75,524 |
| TN | $86,570 | $69,732 | $75,374 |
| NM | $87,360 | $67,338 | $74,500 |
| AK | $94,740 | $75,480 | $74,207 |
| SD | $79,180 | $64,533 | $73,254 |
| VT | $93,430 | $70,502 | $72,957 |
| CO | $97,100 | $73,576 | $72,573 |
| WY | $81,100 | $65,884 | $72,521 |
| IL | $94,880 | $71,026 | $71,849 |
| GA | $91,870 | $69,475 | $71,847 |
| LA | $80,530 | $63,453 | $71,824 |
| ND | $77,400 | $63,031 | $71,163 |
| NE | $83,010 | $64,154 | $70,986 |
| OK | $80,990 | $62,662 | $70,977 |
| SC | $86,260 | $66,110 | $70,951 |
| UT | $88,610 | $67,224 | $70,761 |
| WA | $96,640 | $76,816 | $70,758 |
| NH | $92,600 | $73,974 | $70,221 |
| MS | $78,850 | $61,239 | $70,154 |
| RI | $92,790 | $71,048 | $70,059 |
| ID | $83,220 | $63,818 | $69,804 |
| IN | $82,080 | $64,181 | $69,623 |
| MO | $81,980 | $63,587 | $69,296 |
| TX | $82,970 | $67,199 | $69,153 |
| CT | $95,440 | $71,473 | $68,930 |
| WV | $78,850 | $61,579 | $68,595 |
| MT | $79,700 | $61,757 | $68,433 |
| NV | $81,600 | $66,236 | $68,298 |
| ME | $88,130 | $66,170 | $68,149 |
| NC | $82,350 | $63,986 | $67,970 |
| WI | $82,180 | $63,220 | $67,907 |
| KS | $80,140 | $61,025 | $67,832 |
| PA | $84,240 | $65,507 | $67,186 |
| KY | $76,860 | $60,329 | $66,685 |
| NJ | $96,250 | $72,601 | $66,678 |
| AR | $71,800 | $57,143 | $66,055 |
| AZ | $84,810 | $66,776 | $66,046 |
| MN | $85,970 | $64,987 | $66,033 |
| FL | $84,170 | $68,044 | $65,773 |
| CA | $99,520 | $73,679 | $65,445 |
| OR | $95,250 | $68,054 | $64,986 |
| MA | $92,260 | $69,442 | $64,157 |
| HI | $92,380 | $68,242 | $62,832 |
| DE | $82,000 | $62,336 | $62,805 |
| NY | $88,540 | $66,934 | $62,191 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of budget analysts 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 $91,640.
- Take-home figures for budget analysts 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 $88,802.
- Levelling out prices for budget analysts is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — New York sits at the bottom on $62,191.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for budget analysts, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $91,640, 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 budget analysts 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 $88,802, 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.
- The price deflation applied to budget analysts uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is New York at $62,191. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — New York anchors the bottom at $62,191 — and the two source series are dated independently.