Entertainment and Recreation Managers, Except Gambling
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays this job the most, $113,930. It still pays the most after tax. What it does not do is stay ahead once you count what living there costs. Level that out and Minnesota wins, at $80,038. Same work. A wage that goes further.
- For entertainment and recreation managers, except gambling, the District of Columbia leads both nominally at $113,930 and after tax — state income tax differentials are not large enough here to disturb the ordering. Regional price parity is: deflating take-home by each state's price level puts Minnesota first at $80,038. The adjustment that matters for this occupation is therefore cost of living rather than tax, which is the opposite of the assumption most relocation comparisons start from.
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
$79,520
People doing it
37,980
Highest paid
$113,930
DC
Best off, really
$80,038
MN, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$46,270
Highest tenth
$139,110
Lowest, really
$43,291
WV
States with data
47
National average
$89,750
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
98.42%
MN, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $43,291 up to $80,038.
- Only 37,980 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 47 jurisdictions, averaging $79,520 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.
- The nominal spread for entertainment and recreation managers, except gambling approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $43,291 to $80,038, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in entertainment and recreation managers, except gambling is 37,980. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- Coverage for entertainment and recreation managers, except gambling 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: Entertainment and Recreation Managers, Except Gambling
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $46,270 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $79,520 |
| Top tenth earn over | $139,110 |
| This salary | $79,520 |
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 Entertainment and Recreation Managers, Except Gambling
The national median for this job
$79,520around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $46,270 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $79,520 |
| Top tenth | $139,110 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Entertainment and Recreation Managers, Except Gambling, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $47,310 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $113,930 |
| Spread | $66,620 |
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 | $78,500 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $80,782 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MN | $107,660 | $78,771 | $80,038 |
| WY | $88,790 | $71,294 | $78,476 |
| ID | $95,020 | $71,494 | $78,199 |
| DC | $113,930 | $82,264 | $74,243 |
| CO | $97,000 | $73,510 | $72,508 |
| VT | $92,320 | $69,794 | $72,225 |
| WA | $96,790 | $76,922 | $70,855 |
| SD | $76,000 | $62,296 | $70,715 |
| MO | $83,620 | $64,664 | $70,469 |
| KY | $80,130 | $62,515 | $69,101 |
| OK | $78,420 | $60,970 | $69,060 |
| NV | $82,370 | $66,777 | $68,857 |
| NY | $98,390 | $73,283 | $68,090 |
| RI | $88,750 | $68,357 | $67,406 |
| GA | $83,470 | $63,985 | $66,169 |
| SC | $79,110 | $61,554 | $66,062 |
| TX | $78,500 | $64,055 | $65,917 |
| FL | $83,520 | $67,586 | $65,331 |
| NC | $77,990 | $61,093 | $64,896 |
| ME | $82,780 | $62,789 | $64,666 |
| WI | $77,140 | $59,973 | $64,420 |
| UT | $79,400 | $61,155 | $64,372 |
| TN | $70,530 | $58,448 | $63,177 |
| NJ | $89,590 | $68,340 | $62,764 |
| MA | $89,450 | $67,606 | $62,460 |
| NH | $80,090 | $65,173 | $61,867 |
| IA | $68,320 | $54,909 | $61,857 |
| MS | $67,670 | $53,821 | $61,656 |
| KS | $69,990 | $54,451 | $60,525 |
| AZ | $76,550 | $61,172 | $60,503 |
| IL | $77,310 | $59,536 | $60,225 |
| MD | $81,220 | $62,474 | $60,091 |
| AL | $66,540 | $52,769 | $58,652 |
| CT | $78,010 | $60,169 | $58,029 |
| AK | $70,700 | $58,567 | $57,580 |
| LA | $62,390 | $50,825 | $57,530 |
| VA | $74,800 | $57,911 | $57,481 |
| PA | $68,990 | $55,246 | $56,663 |
| HI | $81,160 | $61,201 | $56,350 |
| NE | $63,270 | $50,842 | $56,256 |
| MI | $65,890 | $52,573 | $55,819 |
| IN | $62,760 | $50,786 | $55,092 |
| OR | $78,200 | $57,551 | $54,957 |
| CA | $79,550 | $61,487 | $54,616 |
| OH | $58,440 | $48,246 | $52,548 |
| AR | $49,640 | $40,688 | $47,033 |
| WV | $47,310 | $38,863 | $43,291 |
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 $79,520 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 this job, 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 the District of Columbia, at $82,264.
- The price adjustment for this job 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 — West Virginia anchors the bottom at $43,291. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for entertainment and recreation managers, except gambling are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $79,520. 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 entertainment and recreation managers, except gambling 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 $82,264, which leads in the District of Columbia.
- Real-terms figures for entertainment and recreation managers, except gambling 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.