Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
What the pay figures show
- A job board will not tell you this about this job. The best headline number is California, at $86,500. State taxes differ, so Alaska leaves you more. Prices differ too, so New Mexico leaves you better off again — $67,625 once levelled out. Moving for the biggest salary can leave you worse off.
- Wage data for educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors places California first at $86,500. That position is not robust: state income tax alone reorders it to Alaska, and regional price parity reorders it again to New Mexico at $67,625. 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
$64,330
People doing it
353,310
Highest paid
$86,500
CA
Best off, really
$67,625
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$45,020
Highest tenth
$104,770
Lowest, really
$43,380
FL
States with data
51
National average
$71,430
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, 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 $43,380 and $67,625. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- 353,310 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $64,330. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $64,330 in the middle.
- Interstate variation for educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $43,380 to $67,625. 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 educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors is 353,310 — 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.
- 51 jurisdictions report educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $45,020 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $64,330 |
| Top tenth earn over | $104,770 |
| This salary | $64,330 |
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 Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
The national median for this job
$64,330around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $45,020 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $64,330 |
| Top tenth | $104,770 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | South Dakota · $51,830 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $86,500 |
| Spread | $34,670 |
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 | $67,900 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $69,874 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NM | $77,880 | $61,124 | $67,625 |
| AK | $82,900 | $67,150 | $66,018 |
| WA | $82,670 | $66,988 | $61,705 |
| WY | $63,430 | $53,146 | $58,500 |
| CA | $86,500 | $65,730 | $58,385 |
| RI | $75,000 | $59,200 | $58,376 |
| TX | $67,900 | $56,598 | $58,243 |
| DE | $74,070 | $57,281 | $57,712 |
| NV | $66,710 | $55,760 | $57,497 |
| KY | $64,350 | $51,751 | $57,203 |
| LA | $61,870 | $50,423 | $57,075 |
| MA | $79,930 | $61,384 | $56,712 |
| MD | $75,820 | $58,932 | $56,684 |
| AR | $59,770 | $48,452 | $56,009 |
| ND | $58,960 | $49,554 | $55,948 |
| NJ | $77,910 | $60,867 | $55,901 |
| NH | $71,080 | $58,835 | $55,850 |
| NE | $62,500 | $50,259 | $55,610 |
| DC | $80,470 | $61,569 | $55,566 |
| CT | $73,910 | $57,511 | $55,465 |
| OH | $61,760 | $50,822 | $55,355 |
| TN | $59,960 | $50,358 | $54,432 |
| WI | $62,690 | $50,284 | $54,013 |
| MS | $58,710 | $47,097 | $53,953 |
| VT | $64,570 | $51,911 | $53,718 |
| VA | $67,660 | $53,299 | $52,903 |
| ID | $60,320 | $48,303 | $52,834 |
| AL | $59,570 | $47,479 | $52,772 |
| SC | $60,340 | $48,978 | $52,565 |
| GA | $63,720 | $50,798 | $52,532 |
| IN | $59,260 | $48,077 | $52,153 |
| MN | $64,600 | $51,217 | $52,040 |
| NY | $71,610 | $55,938 | $51,974 |
| IA | $56,540 | $46,073 | $51,903 |
| MT | $57,900 | $46,738 | $51,791 |
| CO | $64,780 | $52,089 | $51,379 |
| UT | $61,320 | $48,722 | $51,285 |
| MO | $58,040 | $47,025 | $51,246 |
| MI | $59,440 | $47,665 | $50,608 |
| PA | $60,880 | $49,228 | $50,490 |
| WV | $55,520 | $45,113 | $50,253 |
| IL | $62,420 | $49,389 | $49,962 |
| KS | $56,590 | $44,781 | $49,776 |
| SD | $51,830 | $43,825 | $49,748 |
| NC | $57,630 | $46,695 | $49,602 |
| OR | $66,690 | $50,461 | $48,186 |
| ME | $58,630 | $46,652 | $48,047 |
| OK | $52,040 | $42,153 | $47,746 |
| AZ | $58,250 | $47,930 | $47,406 |
| HI | $61,730 | $48,532 | $44,685 |
| FL | $53,140 | $44,878 | $43,380 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $64,330, 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 this job 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 Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $67,150.
- Levelling out prices for this job is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Florida sits at the bottom on $43,380.
- These are distribution medians for educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors, with a national value of $64,330. 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 educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors 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 $67,150, in Alaska. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Florida at $43,380. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Florida anchors the bottom at $43,380 — and the two source series are dated independently.