Court, Municipal, and License Clerks
What the pay figures show
- A job board will not tell you this about court, municipal, and license clerks. The best headline number is the District of Columbia, at $66,130. State taxes differ, so Washington leaves you more. Prices differ too, so North Dakota leaves you better off again — $51,312 once levelled out. Moving for the biggest salary can leave you worse off.
- Wage data for court, municipal, and license clerks places the District of Columbia first at $66,130. That position is not robust: state income tax alone reorders it to Washington, and regional price parity reorders it again to North Dakota at $51,312. 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
$48,700
People doing it
179,750
Highest paid
$66,130
DC
Best off, really
$51,312
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,300
Highest tenth
$73,820
Lowest, really
$34,868
AL
States with data
51
National average
$52,320
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Nationally, this job pays within a fairly narrow band. Adjust for tax and for local prices and the band tightens again, to between $34,868 and $51,312. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- About 179,750 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $48,700. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $48,700, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Wages for court, municipal, and license clerks cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $34,868 to $51,312. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- With 179,750 workers, court, municipal, and license clerks sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for court, municipal, and license clerks, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Court, Municipal, and License Clerks
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,300 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $48,700 |
| Top tenth earn over | $73,820 |
| This salary | $48,700 |
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 Court, Municipal, and License Clerks
The national median for this job
$48,700around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,300 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $48,700 |
| Top tenth | $73,820 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Court, Municipal, and License Clerks, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $36,960 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $66,130 |
| Spread | $29,170 |
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 | $46,580 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $47,934 |
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 | $53,850 | $45,448 | $51,312 |
| WA | $64,680 | $54,150 | $49,880 |
| NV | $56,680 | $47,722 | $49,208 |
| RI | $61,670 | $49,839 | $49,145 |
| DC | $66,130 | $52,464 | $47,348 |
| CT | $60,480 | $48,199 | $46,484 |
| MN | $56,520 | $45,274 | $46,002 |
| CA | $63,320 | $51,064 | $45,358 |
| WI | $51,920 | $42,192 | $45,320 |
| MA | $61,730 | $49,014 | $45,283 |
| AK | $54,270 | $45,786 | $45,014 |
| MD | $58,380 | $46,679 | $44,899 |
| IA | $48,280 | $39,750 | $44,780 |
| VT | $53,000 | $43,246 | $44,752 |
| OR | $61,300 | $46,621 | $44,519 |
| NE | $48,420 | $39,586 | $43,801 |
| OH | $48,030 | $40,168 | $43,750 |
| LA | $46,570 | $38,588 | $43,679 |
| WY | $46,540 | $39,575 | $43,562 |
| UT | $51,130 | $40,988 | $43,144 |
| ID | $48,450 | $39,395 | $43,090 |
| NM | $46,960 | $38,860 | $42,994 |
| NC | $49,110 | $40,189 | $42,691 |
| SD | $43,850 | $37,413 | $42,469 |
| MI | $48,690 | $39,484 | $41,922 |
| MT | $45,680 | $37,494 | $41,547 |
| IN | $46,350 | $38,084 | $41,313 |
| TN | $44,720 | $38,113 | $41,196 |
| TX | $46,580 | $39,607 | $40,758 |
| CO | $50,410 | $41,175 | $40,614 |
| ME | $48,580 | $39,255 | $40,429 |
| NJ | $53,700 | $43,909 | $40,327 |
| AZ | $48,700 | $40,495 | $40,053 |
| KS | $44,740 | $35,921 | $39,927 |
| NY | $53,500 | $42,875 | $39,837 |
| KY | $43,680 | $35,866 | $39,645 |
| SC | $43,460 | $36,515 | $39,189 |
| FL | $47,100 | $40,025 | $38,689 |
| IL | $46,920 | $37,702 | $38,139 |
| HI | $51,890 | $41,371 | $38,092 |
| PA | $44,830 | $36,825 | $37,769 |
| NH | $46,590 | $39,615 | $37,605 |
| MO | $41,020 | $34,149 | $37,215 |
| VA | $45,650 | $36,996 | $36,720 |
| OK | $39,120 | $32,353 | $36,646 |
| DE | $44,600 | $36,108 | $36,379 |
| GA | $42,960 | $35,153 | $36,353 |
| AR | $36,960 | $30,968 | $35,798 |
| WV | $37,810 | $31,586 | $35,185 |
| MS | $37,210 | $30,682 | $35,149 |
| AL | $38,360 | $31,370 | $34,868 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for court, municipal, and license clerks as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $48,700, 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 court, municipal, and license clerks 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 $54,150.
- The price adjustment for court, municipal, and license clerks 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 — Alabama anchors the bottom at $34,868. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for court, municipal, and license clerks, with a national value of $48,700. 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 court, municipal, and license clerks 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 $54,150, 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 court, municipal, and license clerks 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.