Credit Counselors
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for credit counselors. Best paid: California, at $67,120. Tax does not change that. Best off: Nebraska, at $55,619 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- California's $67,120 median for credit counselors survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: Nebraska takes the top position at $55,619. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
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
$52,230
People doing it
27,770
Highest paid
$67,120
CA
Best off, really
$55,619
NE, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$38,350
Highest tenth
$80,440
Lowest, really
$28,608
MO
States with data
46
National average
$57,210
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.38%
NE, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $28,608 to $55,619.
- This is a small job: about 27,770 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 46 jurisdictions have a figure, with $52,230 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. California tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in credit counselors pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $28,608 to $55,619, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 27,770 workers, credit counselors is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- 46 jurisdictions carry a published median for credit counselors. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Credit Counselors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $38,350 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $52,230 |
| Top tenth earn over | $80,440 |
| This salary | $52,230 |
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 Credit Counselors
The national median for this job
$52,230around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $38,350 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $52,230 |
| Top tenth | $80,440 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Credit Counselors, state by state
The national median for this job
46states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Missouri · $30,580 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $67,120 |
| Spread | $36,540 |
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 | $48,220 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $49,622 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NE | $62,510 | $50,266 | $55,619 |
| GA | $64,080 | $51,069 | $52,813 |
| MN | $62,160 | $49,422 | $50,217 |
| ND | $52,220 | $44,139 | $49,834 |
| PA | $58,330 | $47,257 | $48,469 |
| NV | $55,480 | $46,758 | $48,214 |
| WA | $62,360 | $52,286 | $48,163 |
| CA | $67,120 | $53,752 | $47,745 |
| SD | $48,890 | $41,463 | $47,066 |
| NH | $58,830 | $49,450 | $46,941 |
| SC | $53,190 | $43,707 | $46,908 |
| RI | $58,480 | $47,396 | $46,736 |
| NY | $63,030 | $50,018 | $46,474 |
| MD | $60,450 | $48,244 | $46,404 |
| OH | $51,160 | $42,597 | $46,395 |
| MA | $63,240 | $50,151 | $46,334 |
| NM | $50,390 | $41,466 | $45,876 |
| ME | $55,490 | $44,341 | $45,666 |
| DC | $63,580 | $50,580 | $45,648 |
| CO | $57,130 | $46,279 | $45,648 |
| WI | $52,140 | $42,358 | $45,498 |
| ID | $51,130 | $41,406 | $45,290 |
| MI | $52,160 | $42,125 | $44,726 |
| IA | $48,130 | $39,635 | $44,651 |
| LA | $47,250 | $39,114 | $44,274 |
| KY | $48,150 | $39,301 | $43,442 |
| OK | $46,950 | $38,292 | $43,373 |
| UT | $51,330 | $41,139 | $43,304 |
| AL | $48,120 | $38,783 | $43,107 |
| OR | $59,150 | $45,082 | $43,049 |
| AR | $45,060 | $37,177 | $42,975 |
| IN | $48,180 | $39,501 | $42,850 |
| MS | $45,990 | $37,385 | $42,828 |
| NJ | $57,180 | $46,513 | $42,718 |
| DE | $52,840 | $42,271 | $42,589 |
| CT | $54,710 | $43,880 | $42,319 |
| AZ | $51,480 | $42,660 | $42,193 |
| TX | $48,220 | $40,925 | $42,115 |
| WV | $45,860 | $37,759 | $42,061 |
| IL | $51,930 | $41,480 | $41,960 |
| VA | $51,550 | $41,397 | $41,089 |
| NC | $46,180 | $37,952 | $40,315 |
| WY | $42,580 | $36,393 | $40,059 |
| FL | $46,300 | $39,382 | $38,068 |
| TN | $38,730 | $33,300 | $35,994 |
| MO | $30,580 | $26,251 | $28,608 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for credit counselors, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $52,230 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 credit counselors, 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 California, at $53,752.
- The price adjustment for credit counselors 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 — Missouri anchors the bottom at $28,608. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for credit counselors are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $52,230. 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 credit counselors 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 $53,752, which leads in California.
- Real-terms figures for credit counselors 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.