Funeral Attendants
What the pay figures show
- New Hampshire pays funeral attendants the most, $55,850. 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 Nevada wins, at $45,314. Same work. A wage that goes further.
- For funeral attendants, New Hampshire leads both nominally at $55,850 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 Nevada first at $45,314. 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
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$35,680
People doing it
31,090
Highest paid
$55,850
NH
Best off, really
$45,314
NV, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$28,070
Highest tenth
$48,460
Lowest, really
$25,571
FL
States with data
48
National average
$37,190
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 $25,571 to $45,314.
- This is a small job: about 31,090 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $35,680 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. New Hampshire tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in funeral attendants 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 $25,571 to $45,314, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 31,090 workers, funeral attendants 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.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for funeral attendants. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Funeral Attendants
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $28,070 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $35,680 |
| Top tenth earn over | $48,460 |
| This salary | $35,680 |
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 Funeral Attendants
The national median for this job
$35,680around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $28,070 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $35,680 |
| Top tenth | $48,460 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Funeral Attendants, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Kentucky · $29,160 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Hampshire · $55,850 |
| Spread | $26,690 |
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 | $30,560 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $31,448 |
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 | $51,980 | $43,946 | $45,314 |
| NH | $55,850 | $47,055 | $44,668 |
| RI | $53,580 | $43,642 | $43,035 |
| DE | $46,720 | $37,693 | $37,977 |
| IA | $40,060 | $33,458 | $37,692 |
| MN | $43,910 | $35,931 | $36,509 |
| SD | $37,170 | $32,046 | $36,377 |
| CT | $45,800 | $37,169 | $35,847 |
| MO | $39,270 | $32,825 | $35,772 |
| UT | $41,130 | $33,398 | $35,155 |
| VT | $40,800 | $33,852 | $35,031 |
| MA | $46,280 | $37,372 | $34,528 |
| MT | $37,080 | $30,988 | $34,338 |
| ND | $34,980 | $30,286 | $34,194 |
| CO | $41,710 | $34,567 | $34,096 |
| ME | $39,330 | $32,411 | $33,380 |
| OH | $35,640 | $30,553 | $33,278 |
| NM | $34,890 | $29,681 | $32,838 |
| WA | $41,600 | $35,606 | $32,797 |
| WI | $36,030 | $30,207 | $32,447 |
| NY | $42,210 | $34,413 | $31,975 |
| WY | $32,950 | $28,655 | $31,542 |
| IN | $34,420 | $28,851 | $31,297 |
| NC | $34,940 | $29,369 | $31,197 |
| MI | $35,380 | $29,355 | $31,168 |
| AR | $31,630 | $26,883 | $31,076 |
| PA | $36,300 | $30,233 | $31,008 |
| MD | $39,020 | $32,043 | $30,821 |
| ID | $33,280 | $28,010 | $30,637 |
| OR | $40,350 | $31,621 | $30,195 |
| AZ | $35,450 | $30,180 | $29,850 |
| WV | $31,410 | $26,646 | $29,682 |
| IL | $35,690 | $29,235 | $29,574 |
| LA | $30,370 | $26,057 | $29,495 |
| MS | $30,530 | $25,582 | $29,306 |
| OK | $30,530 | $25,838 | $29,266 |
| CA | $38,700 | $32,592 | $28,950 |
| NJ | $37,240 | $31,516 | $28,945 |
| VA | $35,010 | $29,058 | $28,842 |
| NE | $30,170 | $25,717 | $28,455 |
| KS | $30,720 | $25,438 | $28,275 |
| AL | $30,310 | $25,270 | $28,087 |
| TN | $29,600 | $25,964 | $28,064 |
| SC | $29,880 | $25,892 | $27,788 |
| TX | $30,560 | $26,735 | $27,512 |
| KY | $29,160 | $24,707 | $27,310 |
| GA | $30,530 | $25,786 | $26,666 |
| FL | $30,210 | $26,454 | $25,571 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of funeral attendants earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $35,680.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for funeral attendants, 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 New Hampshire, at $47,055.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for funeral attendants. 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 Florida, on $25,571.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for funeral attendants, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $35,680, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Retained-pay figures for funeral attendants 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 $47,055, which leads in New Hampshire.
- Real-terms results for funeral attendants 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; Florida anchors the distribution at $25,571. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.