Emergency Management Directors
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is the District of Columbia, at $184,350. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and New Mexico comes out ahead, worth $116,111. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for emergency management directors: the District of Columbia leads at $184,350 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting New Mexico to $116,111 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
$93,330
People doing it
13,500
Highest paid
$184,350
DC
Best off, really
$116,111
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$54,210
Highest tenth
$166,430
Lowest, really
$45,155
MS
States with data
47
National average
$102,420
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, 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 $45,155 to $116,111.
- This is a small job: about 13,500 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 47 jurisdictions, averaging $93,330 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. The District of Columbia leads the published set.
- Interstate variation in emergency management directors 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 $45,155 to $116,111, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 13,500 workers, emergency management directors 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.
- Coverage for emergency management directors runs to 47 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Emergency Management Directors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $54,210 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $93,330 |
| Top tenth earn over | $166,430 |
| This salary | $93,330 |
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 Emergency Management Directors
The national median for this job
$93,330around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $54,210 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $93,330 |
| Top tenth | $166,430 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Emergency Management Directors, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $48,650 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $184,350 |
| Spread | $135,700 |
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 | $93,570 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $96,290 |
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 | $145,550 | $104,948 | $116,111 |
| DC | $184,350 | $124,568 | $112,422 |
| CO | $129,660 | $94,892 | $93,598 |
| WA | $130,780 | $100,654 | $92,716 |
| NV | $105,570 | $83,098 | $85,686 |
| LA | $96,550 | $74,243 | $84,037 |
| MA | $123,250 | $89,665 | $82,840 |
| CA | $129,910 | $92,070 | $81,781 |
| ID | $99,720 | $74,551 | $81,544 |
| NJ | $120,990 | $88,429 | $81,215 |
| OH | $94,690 | $73,557 | $80,117 |
| CT | $113,380 | $83,040 | $80,086 |
| MN | $106,880 | $78,276 | $79,535 |
| AK | $101,850 | $80,481 | $79,124 |
| TX | $93,570 | $74,656 | $76,827 |
| MD | $107,200 | $79,435 | $76,406 |
| NC | $93,840 | $71,611 | $76,069 |
| SC | $93,680 | $70,838 | $76,025 |
| NE | $89,740 | $68,582 | $75,886 |
| FL | $99,020 | $78,491 | $75,871 |
| OR | $110,720 | $77,584 | $74,086 |
| VA | $99,860 | $74,100 | $73,549 |
| TN | $81,800 | $66,376 | $71,747 |
| MI | $87,880 | $67,169 | $71,317 |
| ND | $76,640 | $62,511 | $70,576 |
| UT | $84,860 | $64,753 | $68,159 |
| RI | $87,690 | $67,652 | $66,710 |
| GA | $83,200 | $63,808 | $65,987 |
| IA | $73,700 | $58,489 | $65,891 |
| ME | $84,050 | $63,592 | $65,493 |
| PA | $81,550 | $63,697 | $65,330 |
| KY | $74,730 | $58,905 | $65,111 |
| MO | $75,660 | $59,438 | $64,774 |
| NY | $92,570 | $69,532 | $64,605 |
| IL | $83,820 | $63,793 | $64,532 |
| WI | $77,260 | $60,051 | $64,503 |
| AZ | $81,970 | $64,849 | $64,140 |
| SD | $67,180 | $56,091 | $63,671 |
| NH | $77,420 | $63,295 | $60,084 |
| WY | $64,370 | $53,901 | $59,331 |
| KS | $68,000 | $53,162 | $59,092 |
| MT | $62,770 | $50,422 | $55,873 |
| OK | $60,990 | $48,941 | $55,435 |
| WV | $60,460 | $48,874 | $54,442 |
| HI | $74,290 | $56,890 | $52,381 |
| AR | $50,180 | $41,102 | $47,512 |
| MS | $48,650 | $39,416 | $45,155 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $93,330 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $124,568.
- 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 — Mississippi sits at the bottom on $45,155.
- All wage figures for emergency management directors are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $93,330. 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.
- Take-home calculations for emergency management directors 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 $124,568, 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.
- The price deflation applied to emergency management directors 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 Mississippi at $45,155. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $45,155 — and the two source series are dated independently.