Clinical and Counseling Psychologists
What the pay figures show
- Oregon pays this job the most on paper: $134,350. Two things happen before that money is yours. State tax takes a share, which puts Alaska in front. Then local prices decide what is left, and New Mexico wins at $101,545. The best offer and the best deal are not the same place.
- For clinical and counseling psychologists, Oregon's $134,350 median leads nominally and survives neither adjustment. State income tax differentials alone are sufficient to promote Alaska; regional price parity then promotes New Mexico, whose $101,545 real figure is the highest purchasing power available in this occupation. Nominal wage comparisons across states are therefore a poor guide to relocation, and the error compounds rather than cancels.
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
$100,580
People doing it
75,990
Highest paid
$134,350
OR
Best off, really
$101,545
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$55,170
Highest tenth
$180,960
Lowest, really
$51,090
NH
States with data
48
National average
$112,750
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $51,090 to $101,545.
- Just 75,990 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $100,580 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Oregon tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in clinical and counseling psychologists is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $51,090 to $101,545 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 75,990 are employed nationally in clinical and counseling psychologists — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for clinical and counseling psychologists. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Clinical and Counseling Psychologists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $55,170 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $100,580 |
| Top tenth earn over | $180,960 |
| This salary | $100,580 |
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 Clinical and Counseling Psychologists
The national median for this job
$100,580around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $55,170 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $100,580 |
| Top tenth | $180,960 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Clinical and Counseling Psychologists, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | New Hampshire · $64,270 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Oregon · $134,350 |
| Spread | $70,080 |
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 | $83,660 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $86,092 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NM | $124,800 | $91,783 | $101,545 |
| ND | $116,130 | $89,522 | $101,073 |
| AK | $124,270 | $96,205 | $94,582 |
| WI | $113,360 | $83,304 | $89,481 |
| AZ | $119,010 | $89,981 | $88,997 |
| OR | $134,350 | $91,813 | $87,674 |
| OH | $101,190 | $77,951 | $84,903 |
| NJ | $127,090 | $92,226 | $84,702 |
| NV | $102,650 | $81,044 | $83,568 |
| KY | $99,140 | $75,223 | $83,148 |
| CO | $113,290 | $84,253 | $83,105 |
| WA | $115,240 | $89,901 | $82,811 |
| DE | $113,050 | $82,130 | $82,749 |
| MO | $99,410 | $75,030 | $81,766 |
| ID | $97,790 | $73,296 | $80,170 |
| MN | $107,030 | $78,371 | $79,632 |
| RI | $107,490 | $80,696 | $79,572 |
| NE | $94,540 | $71,741 | $79,380 |
| IA | $91,690 | $70,461 | $79,378 |
| WY | $89,890 | $72,068 | $79,328 |
| UT | $99,170 | $74,183 | $78,086 |
| MA | $115,180 | $84,420 | $77,995 |
| NY | $114,400 | $83,524 | $77,606 |
| HI | $117,860 | $84,230 | $77,554 |
| AL | $90,800 | $68,890 | $76,570 |
| SC | $92,700 | $70,214 | $75,355 |
| NC | $92,130 | $70,476 | $74,864 |
| GA | $96,060 | $72,214 | $74,679 |
| CA | $116,000 | $83,740 | $74,382 |
| SD | $80,130 | $65,201 | $74,013 |
| PA | $91,870 | $70,640 | $72,451 |
| IN | $84,990 | $66,143 | $71,751 |
| AR | $77,520 | $60,956 | $70,462 |
| DC | $107,000 | $77,978 | $70,375 |
| OK | $79,950 | $61,978 | $70,201 |
| TX | $83,660 | $67,685 | $69,652 |
| MI | $84,730 | $65,087 | $69,107 |
| MS | $76,000 | $59,348 | $67,988 |
| TN | $76,820 | $62,873 | $67,960 |
| WV | $77,040 | $60,388 | $67,269 |
| FL | $85,610 | $69,057 | $66,752 |
| VT | $83,270 | $64,025 | $66,254 |
| KS | $76,690 | $58,791 | $65,348 |
| VA | $86,520 | $65,483 | $64,996 |
| LA | $71,330 | $57,257 | $64,811 |
| IL | $83,750 | $63,747 | $64,486 |
| MT | $68,160 | $54,290 | $60,160 |
| NH | $64,270 | $53,821 | $51,090 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $100,580 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- 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 Alaska, at $96,205.
- Levelling out prices for this job 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 Hampshire sits at the bottom on $51,090.
- All wage figures for clinical and counseling psychologists are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $100,580. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Retained-pay figures for clinical and counseling psychologists 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 $96,205, which leads in Alaska.
- The price deflation applied to clinical and counseling psychologists 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 Hampshire at $51,090. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — New Hampshire anchors the bottom at $51,090 — and the two source series are dated independently.