Child, Family, and School Social Workers
What the pay figures show
- A job board will not tell you this about this job. The best headline number is Connecticut, at $78,970. State taxes differ, so Washington leaves you more. Prices differ too, so North Dakota leaves you better off again — $61,028 once levelled out. Moving for the biggest salary can leave you worse off.
- Wage data for child, family, and school social workers places Connecticut first at $78,970. That position is not robust: state income tax alone reorders it to Washington, and regional price parity reorders it again to North Dakota at $61,028. Because published comparisons almost universally stop at the nominal median, the state that appears best for this occupation is routinely not the state where a worker's income goes furthest.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$59,550
People doing it
392,550
Highest paid
$78,970
CT
Best off, really
$61,028
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$42,280
Highest tenth
$95,530
Lowest, really
$39,334
DE
States with data
51
National average
$64,000
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $39,334 to $61,028. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- 392,550 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $59,550. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $59,550 in the middle.
- Geographic dispersion in child, family, and school social workers is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $39,334 through $61,028. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- National employment in child, family, and school social workers is 392,550 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- 51 jurisdictions report child, family, and school social workers, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Child, Family, and School Social Workers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $42,280 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $59,550 |
| Top tenth earn over | $95,530 |
| This salary | $59,550 |
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 Child, Family, and School Social Workers
The national median for this job
$59,550around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $42,280 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $59,550 |
| Top tenth | $95,530 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Child, Family, and School Social Workers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $43,330 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Connecticut · $78,970 |
| Spread | $35,640 |
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 | $55,680 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $57,299 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ND | $64,560 | $54,054 | $61,028 |
| CT | $78,970 | $60,792 | $58,629 |
| MD | $76,390 | $59,305 | $57,044 |
| WA | $74,480 | $61,227 | $56,398 |
| NH | $71,010 | $58,786 | $55,803 |
| VT | $67,340 | $53,870 | $55,745 |
| RI | $69,870 | $55,783 | $55,007 |
| NJ | $76,280 | $59,824 | $54,943 |
| MA | $75,570 | $58,535 | $54,080 |
| MN | $67,450 | $53,218 | $54,074 |
| NV | $61,080 | $51,258 | $52,854 |
| KY | $59,100 | $47,716 | $52,743 |
| LA | $56,800 | $46,501 | $52,636 |
| ID | $59,840 | $47,943 | $52,440 |
| WY | $56,420 | $47,513 | $52,300 |
| DC | $73,550 | $57,238 | $51,657 |
| AK | $62,630 | $52,503 | $51,618 |
| ME | $63,290 | $50,081 | $51,579 |
| WI | $59,280 | $47,743 | $51,283 |
| TN | $56,310 | $47,425 | $51,262 |
| NC | $59,610 | $48,207 | $51,208 |
| MT | $56,780 | $45,891 | $50,852 |
| NM | $56,160 | $45,831 | $50,706 |
| CO | $63,720 | $51,284 | $50,585 |
| IL | $63,220 | $49,993 | $50,572 |
| MI | $59,270 | $47,535 | $50,471 |
| SD | $51,100 | $43,239 | $49,082 |
| HI | $68,270 | $53,113 | $48,903 |
| VA | $61,330 | $48,693 | $48,331 |
| TX | $55,680 | $46,919 | $48,283 |
| IA | $52,250 | $42,789 | $48,204 |
| NY | $65,100 | $51,569 | $47,915 |
| KS | $54,300 | $43,069 | $47,873 |
| WV | $52,220 | $42,601 | $47,455 |
| OH | $51,520 | $42,876 | $46,700 |
| CA | $65,200 | $52,425 | $46,566 |
| OR | $64,130 | $48,647 | $46,454 |
| FL | $56,550 | $47,618 | $46,029 |
| SC | $51,800 | $42,683 | $45,808 |
| IN | $50,470 | $41,273 | $44,773 |
| UT | $52,000 | $41,648 | $43,839 |
| MO | $48,520 | $39,823 | $43,398 |
| MS | $46,530 | $37,798 | $43,300 |
| NE | $47,770 | $39,093 | $43,256 |
| PA | $50,820 | $41,454 | $42,517 |
| AL | $46,660 | $37,674 | $41,874 |
| AR | $43,330 | $35,851 | $41,442 |
| AZ | $50,150 | $41,624 | $41,169 |
| OK | $43,950 | $36,017 | $40,795 |
| GA | $47,510 | $38,582 | $39,899 |
| DE | $48,520 | $39,040 | $39,334 |
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 $59,550.
- Take-home figures for this job 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $61,227.
- The price adjustment for this job 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 — Delaware anchors the bottom at $39,334. 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 child, family, and school social workers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $59,550, 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 child, family, and school social workers 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 $61,227, in Washington. 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 child, family, and school social workers 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.