First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is the District of Columbia, at $97,640. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Tennessee comes out ahead, worth $71,389. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for first-line supervisors of protective service workers, all other: the District of Columbia leads at $97,640 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Tennessee to $71,389 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
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$76,400
People doing it
20,690
Highest paid
$97,640
DC
Best off, really
$71,389
TN, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$41,110
Highest tenth
$103,420
Lowest, really
$38,670
DE
States with data
50
National average
$74,390
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
92.52%
TN, 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 $38,670 up to $71,389.
- Only 20,690 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $76,400. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, The District of Columbia pays most.
- The nominal spread for first-line supervisors of protective service workers, all other approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $38,670 to $71,389, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in first-line supervisors of protective service workers, all other is 20,690. ⚠️ 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.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for first-line supervisors of protective service workers, all other in 50 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $41,110 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $76,400 |
| Top tenth earn over | $103,420 |
| This salary | $76,400 |
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 Protective Service Workers, All Other
The national median for this job
$76,400around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $41,110 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $76,400 |
| Top tenth | $103,420 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
First-Line Supervisors of Protective Service Workers, All Other, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Delaware · $47,640 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $97,640 |
| Spread | $50,000 |
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 | $76,400 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $78,621 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| TN | $81,330 | $66,046 | $71,389 |
| SD | $76,400 | $62,577 | $71,034 |
| ND | $76,400 | $62,347 | $70,391 |
| AK | $89,170 | $71,561 | $70,355 |
| MT | $80,200 | $62,080 | $68,792 |
| LA | $76,400 | $60,672 | $68,676 |
| RI | $89,320 | $68,737 | $67,780 |
| AL | $78,850 | $60,949 | $67,744 |
| SC | $81,330 | $62,969 | $67,580 |
| NE | $77,150 | $60,298 | $66,719 |
| IL | $86,260 | $65,389 | $66,146 |
| MI | $80,430 | $62,245 | $66,089 |
| KS | $76,920 | $58,940 | $65,514 |
| DC | $97,640 | $72,189 | $65,150 |
| OH | $74,130 | $59,658 | $64,979 |
| MO | $75,800 | $59,530 | $64,874 |
| NY | $92,930 | $69,764 | $64,820 |
| WV | $73,280 | $57,915 | $64,514 |
| KY | $73,920 | $58,363 | $64,512 |
| TX | $76,400 | $62,577 | $64,397 |
| NV | $76,160 | $62,409 | $64,352 |
| ME | $81,330 | $61,873 | $63,723 |
| MN | $80,600 | $61,575 | $62,565 |
| GA | $77,540 | $60,109 | $62,161 |
| FL | $78,730 | $64,217 | $62,074 |
| WI | $73,500 | $57,629 | $61,902 |
| CA | $92,690 | $69,509 | $61,742 |
| AR | $66,010 | $53,235 | $61,538 |
| AZ | $77,330 | $61,701 | $61,027 |
| UT | $73,920 | $57,543 | $60,571 |
| WY | $65,270 | $54,624 | $60,127 |
| WA | $79,270 | $64,596 | $59,502 |
| IN | $67,980 | $54,678 | $59,314 |
| OK | $62,530 | $50,110 | $56,758 |
| NC | $66,400 | $53,392 | $56,716 |
| ID | $64,160 | $51,185 | $55,986 |
| HI | $79,750 | $60,316 | $55,535 |
| MA | $76,280 | $58,999 | $54,509 |
| OR | $77,220 | $56,948 | $54,380 |
| VT | $65,000 | $52,228 | $54,047 |
| PA | $63,150 | $50,982 | $52,290 |
| NM | $57,970 | $47,200 | $52,220 |
| CO | $65,490 | $52,628 | $51,911 |
| NH | $65,220 | $54,584 | $51,815 |
| IA | $56,410 | $45,974 | $51,791 |
| MS | $49,330 | $39,935 | $45,749 |
| MD | $57,950 | $46,354 | $44,586 |
| CT | $56,190 | $44,988 | $43,388 |
| NJ | $54,720 | $44,672 | $41,028 |
| DE | $47,640 | $38,382 | $38,670 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $76,400, 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $72,189.
- 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 — Delaware anchors the bottom at $38,670. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for first-line supervisors of protective service workers, all other, with a national value of $76,400. 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 first-line supervisors of protective service workers, all other 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 $72,189, 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.
- Real-terms figures for first-line supervisors of protective service workers, all other 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.