First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is California, at $131,210. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Nevada comes out ahead, worth $86,912. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for first-line supervisors of correctional officers: California leads at $131,210 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Nevada to $86,912 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
$77,970
People doing it
53,380
Highest paid
$131,210
CA
Best off, really
$86,912
NV, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$52,330
Highest tenth
$127,780
Lowest, really
$42,013
MO
States with data
49
National average
$84,380
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.98%
NV, 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 $42,013 to $86,912.
- This is a small job: about 53,380 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 49 jurisdictions, averaging $77,970 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. California leads the published set.
- Interstate variation in first-line supervisors of correctional officers 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 $42,013 to $86,912, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 53,380 workers, first-line supervisors of correctional officers 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 first-line supervisors of correctional officers runs to 49 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: First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $52,330 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $77,970 |
| Top tenth earn over | $127,780 |
| This salary | $77,970 |
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 First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers
The national median for this job
$77,970around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $52,330 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $77,970 |
| Top tenth | $127,780 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Missouri · $46,840 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $131,210 |
| Spread | $84,370 |
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 | $62,590 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $64,410 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NV | $107,260 | $84,287 | $86,912 |
| UT | $110,410 | $81,590 | $85,883 |
| CA | $131,210 | $92,838 | $82,463 |
| NJ | $117,450 | $86,164 | $79,135 |
| IL | $105,450 | $77,939 | $78,842 |
| WI | $96,260 | $72,289 | $77,649 |
| AK | $98,420 | $78,068 | $76,752 |
| PA | $94,600 | $72,477 | $74,335 |
| MN | $96,720 | $71,819 | $72,974 |
| MA | $105,930 | $78,375 | $72,410 |
| WA | $98,910 | $78,413 | $72,229 |
| SD | $77,400 | $63,281 | $71,833 |
| NY | $103,320 | $76,460 | $71,042 |
| NE | $80,490 | $62,496 | $69,151 |
| AL | $80,230 | $61,866 | $68,763 |
| ND | $73,240 | $60,185 | $67,951 |
| OR | $99,890 | $70,912 | $67,716 |
| OH | $77,570 | $61,984 | $67,512 |
| ID | $79,330 | $61,287 | $67,036 |
| IA | $74,420 | $58,968 | $66,430 |
| TN | $74,140 | $60,987 | $65,922 |
| HI | $97,200 | $71,266 | $65,617 |
| NH | $85,550 | $69,014 | $65,513 |
| VT | $81,700 | $63,024 | $65,219 |
| CT | $89,160 | $67,400 | $65,002 |
| MT | $74,630 | $58,477 | $64,798 |
| SC | $77,110 | $60,280 | $64,694 |
| DE | $84,760 | $64,096 | $64,578 |
| WY | $70,770 | $58,617 | $64,522 |
| MI | $78,150 | $60,738 | $64,489 |
| CO | $81,460 | $63,261 | $62,399 |
| KS | $71,590 | $55,487 | $61,677 |
| AZ | $74,840 | $60,011 | $59,356 |
| MD | $79,150 | $61,116 | $58,785 |
| NC | $67,270 | $53,979 | $57,340 |
| NM | $63,380 | $51,293 | $56,748 |
| KY | $62,780 | $50,544 | $55,870 |
| ME | $67,750 | $53,239 | $54,831 |
| LA | $58,960 | $48,172 | $54,527 |
| IN | $61,460 | $49,780 | $54,000 |
| TX | $62,590 | $52,471 | $53,996 |
| MS | $56,470 | $45,387 | $51,994 |
| OK | $56,100 | $45,232 | $51,234 |
| WV | $56,490 | $45,852 | $51,076 |
| VA | $64,190 | $50,826 | $50,449 |
| GA | $58,640 | $46,970 | $48,573 |
| AR | $49,590 | $40,649 | $46,989 |
| FL | $55,620 | $46,871 | $45,307 |
| MO | $46,840 | $38,552 | $42,013 |
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 $77,970 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 California, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $92,838.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Missouri, on $42,013.
- All wage figures for first-line supervisors of correctional officers are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $77,970. 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 first-line supervisors of correctional officers 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 $92,838, in California. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for first-line supervisors of correctional officers rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Missouri anchors the distribution at $42,013. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.