Editors
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. New York pays editors best, at $101,480. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $69,940 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for editors is also the real leader: New York at $101,480, holding through tax and through price deflation to $69,940. 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
$77,920
People doing it
91,690
Highest paid
$101,480
NY
Best off, really
$69,940
NY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$41,250
Highest tenth
$153,700
Lowest, really
$40,224
HI
States with data
50
National average
$90,060
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
107.63%
NY, 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 $40,224 to $69,940.
- This is a small job: about 91,690 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 50 jurisdictions have a figure, with $77,920 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. New York tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in editors 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 $40,224 to $69,940, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 91,690 workers, editors 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.
- 50 jurisdictions carry a published median for editors. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Editors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $41,250 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $77,920 |
| Top tenth earn over | $153,700 |
| This salary | $77,920 |
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 Editors
The national median for this job
$77,920around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $41,250 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $77,920 |
| Top tenth | $153,700 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Editors, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Texas · $45,950 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New York · $101,480 |
| Spread | $55,530 |
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 | $45,950 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $47,286 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NY | $101,480 | $75,274 | $69,940 |
| CA | $98,030 | $72,769 | $64,637 |
| OH | $72,160 | $58,327 | $63,528 |
| CT | $85,950 | $65,319 | $62,995 |
| NC | $73,740 | $58,273 | $61,901 |
| NV | $72,510 | $59,841 | $61,704 |
| GA | $76,650 | $59,527 | $61,559 |
| VA | $80,590 | $61,652 | $61,193 |
| RI | $77,960 | $61,171 | $60,320 |
| CO | $77,870 | $60,894 | $60,064 |
| IL | $76,060 | $58,718 | $59,398 |
| FL | $73,950 | $60,854 | $58,823 |
| MA | $83,170 | $63,502 | $58,668 |
| WA | $77,850 | $63,597 | $58,582 |
| DE | $75,020 | $57,886 | $58,322 |
| NJ | $81,680 | $63,279 | $58,116 |
| DC | $83,920 | $63,703 | $57,492 |
| NM | $64,250 | $51,951 | $57,477 |
| ND | $60,520 | $50,808 | $57,363 |
| MD | $75,550 | $58,754 | $56,514 |
| AL | $63,330 | $50,335 | $55,947 |
| VT | $66,860 | $53,564 | $55,429 |
| WI | $64,270 | $51,460 | $55,276 |
| MT | $61,750 | $49,651 | $55,018 |
| LA | $58,860 | $48,094 | $54,439 |
| UT | $65,040 | $51,545 | $54,257 |
| SD | $56,730 | $47,763 | $54,217 |
| KS | $61,920 | $48,766 | $54,206 |
| MO | $61,620 | $49,733 | $54,198 |
| TN | $59,550 | $50,028 | $54,076 |
| SC | $62,000 | $50,202 | $53,878 |
| MI | $63,090 | $50,442 | $53,557 |
| KY | $59,430 | $47,970 | $53,024 |
| NH | $66,510 | $55,620 | $52,798 |
| PA | $63,460 | $51,222 | $52,535 |
| IA | $57,200 | $46,578 | $52,473 |
| AK | $63,630 | $53,307 | $52,408 |
| WV | $56,630 | $45,958 | $51,194 |
| AZ | $63,090 | $51,698 | $51,133 |
| OR | $71,540 | $53,449 | $51,039 |
| MN | $62,650 | $49,782 | $50,583 |
| MS | $54,380 | $43,791 | $50,166 |
| IN | $56,440 | $45,894 | $49,785 |
| AR | $50,180 | $41,102 | $47,512 |
| OK | $50,780 | $41,197 | $46,663 |
| WY | $46,710 | $39,711 | $43,712 |
| NE | $46,320 | $37,994 | $42,040 |
| ME | $50,180 | $40,433 | $41,641 |
| TX | $45,950 | $39,101 | $40,238 |
| HI | $55,070 | $43,687 | $40,224 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for editors as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $77,920, 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.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for editors, 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 New York, at $75,274.
- The price adjustment for editors 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 — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $40,224. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for editors, with a national value of $77,920. 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.
- Retained-pay figures for editors 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 $75,274, which leads in New York.
- Real-terms figures for editors 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.