Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for this job. Best paid: California, at $106,900. Tax does not change that. Best off: Illinois, at $75,349 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- California's $106,900 median for camera operators, television, video, and film survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: Illinois takes the top position at $75,349. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
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
$74,990
People doing it
21,550
Highest paid
$106,900
CA
Best off, really
$75,349
IL, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$38,520
Highest tenth
$135,180
Lowest, really
$32,044
ME
States with data
46
National average
$83,210
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
98.86%
IL, 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 $32,044 up to $75,349.
- Only 21,550 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- This job is not published everywhere — 46 jurisdictions have a figure, with $74,990 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. California tops the ones that are.
- The nominal spread for camera operators, television, video, and film approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $32,044 to $75,349, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in camera operators, television, video, and film is 21,550. ⚠️ 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.
- 46 jurisdictions carry a published median for camera operators, television, video, and film. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $38,520 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $74,990 |
| Top tenth earn over | $135,180 |
| This salary | $74,990 |
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 Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film
The national median for this job
$74,990around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $38,520 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $74,990 |
| Top tenth | $135,180 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film, state by state
The national median for this job
46states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Maine · $37,590 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $106,900 |
| Spread | $69,310 |
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 | $63,110 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $64,945 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IL | $100,170 | $74,486 | $75,349 |
| CA | $106,900 | $78,184 | $69,447 |
| GA | $85,050 | $65,017 | $67,237 |
| AK | $83,620 | $67,657 | $66,516 |
| DC | $98,300 | $72,597 | $65,518 |
| NY | $93,410 | $70,073 | $65,108 |
| UT | $73,450 | $57,234 | $60,245 |
| CO | $74,990 | $58,994 | $58,190 |
| OH | $64,860 | $53,228 | $57,975 |
| AZ | $68,250 | $55,540 | $54,933 |
| AL | $61,800 | $49,173 | $54,655 |
| TX | $63,110 | $52,889 | $54,426 |
| LA | $58,440 | $47,770 | $54,072 |
| NC | $62,720 | $50,582 | $53,731 |
| NV | $62,110 | $52,085 | $53,707 |
| KS | $60,690 | $47,846 | $53,183 |
| IA | $57,220 | $46,594 | $52,490 |
| TN | $57,030 | $48,004 | $51,887 |
| ND | $53,650 | $45,288 | $51,131 |
| ID | $58,140 | $46,667 | $51,044 |
| SC | $57,940 | $47,209 | $50,666 |
| FL | $62,220 | $52,174 | $50,433 |
| MD | $65,870 | $52,341 | $50,345 |
| CT | $65,630 | $52,054 | $50,202 |
| IN | $56,810 | $46,180 | $50,096 |
| KY | $53,790 | $43,635 | $48,233 |
| MI | $55,290 | $44,506 | $47,255 |
| WA | $60,250 | $50,591 | $46,601 |
| MS | $49,920 | $40,386 | $46,265 |
| VA | $58,440 | $46,537 | $46,191 |
| AR | $48,680 | $39,952 | $46,183 |
| WI | $52,810 | $42,863 | $46,041 |
| MT | $50,910 | $41,450 | $45,931 |
| MA | $61,320 | $48,705 | $44,998 |
| OK | $48,620 | $39,559 | $44,808 |
| NM | $49,050 | $40,450 | $44,752 |
| PA | $51,760 | $42,180 | $43,262 |
| SD | $44,160 | $37,663 | $42,752 |
| MN | $51,420 | $41,523 | $42,191 |
| NE | $46,180 | $37,888 | $41,923 |
| RI | $49,790 | $40,739 | $40,172 |
| WV | $43,390 | $35,879 | $39,966 |
| VT | $46,350 | $38,126 | $39,453 |
| NH | $45,880 | $39,045 | $37,064 |
| HI | $44,230 | $35,768 | $32,933 |
| ME | $37,590 | $31,114 | $32,044 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of this job 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 $74,990.
- 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 California, at $78,184.
- 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 Maine, on $32,044.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for camera operators, television, video, and film, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $74,990, 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.
- Retained-pay figures for camera operators, television, video, and film 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 $78,184, which leads in California.
- Real-terms results for camera operators, television, video, and film 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; Maine anchors the distribution at $32,044. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.