Compliance Officers
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for compliance officers is the District of Columbia, at $111,030. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and North Dakota comes out ahead, worth $72,739. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for compliance officers: the District of Columbia leads at $111,030 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting North Dakota to $72,739 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
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
$80,730
People doing it
417,070
Highest paid
$111,030
DC
Best off, really
$72,739
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$48,220
Highest tenth
$133,720
Lowest, really
$56,027
UT
States with data
51
National average
$88,400
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, 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 $56,027 and $72,739. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- 417,070 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $80,730. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $80,730, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Interstate variation for compliance officers is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $56,027 to $72,739. 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 compliance officers is 417,070 — 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.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for compliance officers, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Compliance Officers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $48,220 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $80,730 |
| Top tenth earn over | $133,720 |
| This salary | $80,730 |
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 Compliance Officers
The national median for this job
$80,730around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $48,220 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $80,730 |
| Top tenth | $133,720 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Compliance Officers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Oklahoma · $63,000 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $111,030 |
| Spread | $48,030 |
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 | $75,370 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $77,561 |
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 | $79,440 | $64,426 | $72,739 |
| DC | $111,030 | $80,471 | $72,624 |
| WY | $79,890 | $65,033 | $71,584 |
| VT | $90,420 | $68,583 | $70,971 |
| MA | $102,060 | $75,846 | $70,074 |
| NJ | $100,000 | $75,000 | $68,881 |
| DE | $91,050 | $68,105 | $68,618 |
| PA | $85,580 | $66,408 | $68,111 |
| SD | $72,630 | $59,925 | $68,023 |
| IA | $75,620 | $59,767 | $67,330 |
| IN | $78,770 | $61,950 | $67,203 |
| RI | $87,620 | $67,605 | $66,664 |
| CT | $91,810 | $69,119 | $66,660 |
| MN | $85,920 | $64,956 | $66,000 |
| NV | $78,290 | $63,907 | $65,897 |
| WA | $88,790 | $71,294 | $65,671 |
| OH | $75,030 | $60,267 | $65,641 |
| WI | $78,800 | $61,043 | $65,569 |
| ME | $83,740 | $63,396 | $65,291 |
| NC | $78,500 | $61,431 | $65,256 |
| NE | $73,920 | $58,173 | $64,368 |
| ID | $75,450 | $58,764 | $64,275 |
| CA | $96,980 | $72,128 | $64,068 |
| LA | $70,290 | $56,557 | $64,018 |
| MI | $77,390 | $60,236 | $63,955 |
| NH | $82,800 | $67,080 | $63,676 |
| TX | $75,370 | $61,853 | $63,651 |
| SC | $75,460 | $59,228 | $63,565 |
| AL | $72,990 | $57,055 | $63,416 |
| NY | $90,080 | $67,927 | $63,114 |
| CO | $82,450 | $63,914 | $63,043 |
| IL | $80,550 | $61,654 | $62,369 |
| MD | $84,720 | $64,770 | $62,300 |
| AK | $76,430 | $62,599 | $61,543 |
| MS | $67,450 | $53,675 | $61,489 |
| VA | $80,380 | $61,516 | $61,059 |
| KY | $69,240 | $55,235 | $61,054 |
| NM | $67,990 | $54,631 | $60,442 |
| AR | $64,680 | $52,216 | $60,360 |
| KS | $69,740 | $54,289 | $60,345 |
| FL | $74,920 | $61,536 | $59,483 |
| AZ | $74,920 | $60,066 | $59,409 |
| MT | $66,660 | $53,320 | $59,084 |
| MO | $67,270 | $53,930 | $58,772 |
| TN | $63,960 | $53,572 | $57,906 |
| OR | $82,990 | $60,502 | $57,774 |
| WV | $64,270 | $51,766 | $57,664 |
| GA | $70,200 | $55,312 | $57,200 |
| HI | $82,590 | $62,098 | $57,176 |
| OK | $63,000 | $50,466 | $57,162 |
| UT | $67,370 | $53,227 | $56,027 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for compliance officers as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $80,730, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- Take-home figures for compliance officers 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 $80,471.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for compliance officers. 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 Utah, on $56,027.
- These are distribution medians for compliance officers, with a national value of $80,730. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for compliance officers 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 $80,471, 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.
- Real-terms results for compliance officers 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; Utah anchors the distribution at $56,027. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.