Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. Delaware pays this job best, at $99,560. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $74,084 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists is also the real leader: Delaware at $99,560, holding through tax and through price deflation to $74,084. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
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
$78,210
People doing it
112,380
Highest paid
$99,560
DE
Best off, really
$74,084
DE, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$49,480
Highest tenth
$128,920
Lowest, really
$43,911
UT
States with data
50
National average
$84,330
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
99.25%
DE, 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 $43,911 up to $74,084.
- 112,380 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $78,210. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- This job is not published everywhere — 50 jurisdictions have a figure, with $78,210 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Delaware tops the ones that are.
- The nominal spread for compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $43,911 to $74,084, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists is 112,380 — 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.
- 50 jurisdictions carry a published median for compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $49,480 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $78,210 |
| Top tenth earn over | $128,920 |
| This salary | $78,210 |
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 Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists
The national median for this job
$78,210around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $49,480 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $78,210 |
| Top tenth | $128,920 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $48,080 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Delaware · $99,560 |
| Spread | $51,480 |
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 | $74,800 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $76,975 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DE | $99,560 | $73,531 | $74,084 |
| NM | $83,540 | $64,838 | $71,734 |
| CO | $92,560 | $70,582 | $69,620 |
| MA | $95,890 | $71,814 | $66,348 |
| OH | $75,780 | $60,774 | $66,194 |
| ND | $70,480 | $58,298 | $65,819 |
| MI | $79,480 | $61,617 | $65,422 |
| MT | $75,290 | $58,904 | $65,271 |
| WA | $86,630 | $69,774 | $64,271 |
| MO | $74,260 | $58,519 | $63,773 |
| AK | $79,160 | $64,519 | $63,431 |
| TX | $74,800 | $61,452 | $63,238 |
| WY | $69,090 | $57,435 | $63,221 |
| TN | $69,990 | $58,068 | $62,766 |
| NH | $80,810 | $65,680 | $62,347 |
| RI | $80,330 | $62,750 | $61,876 |
| VA | $81,190 | $62,039 | $61,578 |
| IL | $79,300 | $60,837 | $61,542 |
| VT | $76,030 | $59,410 | $61,478 |
| SD | $64,630 | $54,110 | $61,423 |
| MN | $78,770 | $60,412 | $61,383 |
| CT | $83,100 | $63,470 | $61,212 |
| ME | $77,400 | $59,376 | $61,152 |
| CA | $91,410 | $68,728 | $61,047 |
| IA | $67,160 | $54,137 | $60,988 |
| WI | $72,130 | $56,746 | $60,954 |
| NJ | $85,040 | $65,429 | $60,091 |
| NE | $67,410 | $53,889 | $59,628 |
| IN | $68,300 | $54,894 | $59,548 |
| AZ | $74,930 | $60,073 | $59,416 |
| MD | $79,700 | $61,477 | $59,132 |
| KS | $67,990 | $53,156 | $59,085 |
| DC | $86,710 | $65,429 | $59,049 |
| NY | $83,200 | $63,465 | $58,968 |
| OK | $64,260 | $51,422 | $58,244 |
| OR | $83,320 | $60,705 | $57,969 |
| NC | $67,970 | $54,444 | $57,833 |
| PA | $70,640 | $56,357 | $57,802 |
| LA | $62,700 | $51,065 | $57,801 |
| KY | $64,690 | $52,012 | $57,492 |
| AR | $61,280 | $49,610 | $57,347 |
| ID | $63,680 | $50,825 | $55,592 |
| SC | $63,450 | $51,271 | $55,025 |
| GA | $66,690 | $53,017 | $54,827 |
| FL | $65,020 | $54,424 | $52,608 |
| AL | $57,710 | $46,067 | $51,202 |
| MS | $51,670 | $41,722 | $47,796 |
| HI | $64,090 | $50,249 | $46,266 |
| WV | $48,080 | $39,449 | $43,944 |
| UT | $52,090 | $41,716 | $43,911 |
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 $78,210.
- One filer, no dependants, nothing paid into a pension before tax — that is the household behind every take-home figure for this job. It is the simplest case on purpose, so the states can be compared against each other rather than against each other's family circumstances. City income taxes are not counted. On that household, Delaware keeps the most at $73,531.
- 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 — Utah anchors the bottom at $43,911. 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 compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $78,210, 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.
- The household modeled for compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists is a single filer, standard deduction, no dependants, no pre-tax contributions. Holding the household constant is what makes the interstate comparison meaningful; it also means the absolute figures overstate liability for most real filers. On that basis Delaware retains the most, $73,531. Municipal and school-district income taxes are not included in any state.
- Real-terms figures for compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists 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.