Health Education Specialists
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for health education specialists is Maryland, at $104,470. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Georgia comes out ahead, worth $76,936. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for health education specialists: Maryland leads at $104,470 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Georgia to $76,936 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
$64,070
People doing it
65,690
Highest paid
$104,470
MD
Best off, really
$76,936
GA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$42,990
Highest tenth
$118,200
Lowest, really
$38,115
FL
States with data
51
National average
$73,280
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.7%
GA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $38,115 to $76,936.
- Just 65,690 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $64,070. Nothing is missing.
- Geographic dispersion in health education specialists is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $38,115 to $76,936 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 65,690 are employed nationally in health education specialists — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- Coverage for health education specialists is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Health Education Specialists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $42,990 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $64,070 |
| Top tenth earn over | $118,200 |
| This salary | $64,070 |
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 Health Education Specialists
The national median for this job
$64,070around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $42,990 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $64,070 |
| Top tenth | $118,200 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Health Education Specialists, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Florida · $46,360 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Maryland · $104,470 |
| Spread | $58,110 |
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 | $59,340 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $61,065 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| GA | $99,400 | $74,397 | $76,936 |
| MD | $104,470 | $77,650 | $74,689 |
| DC | $103,330 | $75,708 | $68,326 |
| IA | $75,750 | $59,853 | $67,428 |
| PA | $80,670 | $63,105 | $64,723 |
| WI | $74,040 | $57,976 | $62,275 |
| MN | $78,400 | $60,177 | $61,145 |
| RI | $75,360 | $59,440 | $58,612 |
| AK | $71,940 | $59,440 | $58,438 |
| WA | $77,420 | $63,295 | $58,303 |
| AR | $62,270 | $50,369 | $58,224 |
| KY | $65,370 | $52,534 | $58,070 |
| OH | $64,860 | $53,228 | $57,975 |
| WY | $62,750 | $52,600 | $57,898 |
| CO | $74,150 | $58,440 | $57,644 |
| AL | $65,210 | $51,763 | $57,534 |
| OK | $62,440 | $50,041 | $56,681 |
| ND | $59,650 | $50,109 | $56,574 |
| WV | $62,760 | $50,622 | $56,390 |
| VT | $68,140 | $54,380 | $56,273 |
| SC | $64,720 | $52,207 | $56,030 |
| NH | $69,990 | $58,068 | $55,122 |
| KS | $62,990 | $49,566 | $55,095 |
| SD | $57,370 | $48,277 | $54,801 |
| NV | $62,120 | $52,093 | $53,716 |
| ID | $61,330 | $49,061 | $53,663 |
| LA | $57,840 | $47,305 | $53,546 |
| NJ | $73,740 | $58,180 | $53,433 |
| OR | $75,500 | $55,888 | $53,369 |
| NM | $57,990 | $47,215 | $52,237 |
| AZ | $63,390 | $51,932 | $51,364 |
| TX | $59,340 | $49,860 | $51,309 |
| IN | $58,170 | $47,233 | $51,238 |
| CT | $66,870 | $52,945 | $51,062 |
| NE | $56,800 | $45,938 | $50,830 |
| DE | $63,300 | $50,095 | $50,472 |
| MO | $57,050 | $46,276 | $50,430 |
| VA | $64,040 | $50,714 | $50,337 |
| UT | $59,790 | $47,561 | $50,063 |
| NC | $58,080 | $47,039 | $49,967 |
| IL | $60,120 | $47,655 | $48,207 |
| MI | $56,360 | $45,321 | $48,119 |
| ME | $58,300 | $46,409 | $47,796 |
| MS | $51,020 | $41,226 | $47,227 |
| MT | $51,200 | $41,670 | $46,174 |
| NY | $62,560 | $49,666 | $46,147 |
| HI | $63,740 | $49,994 | $46,031 |
| CA | $63,610 | $51,274 | $45,544 |
| TN | $49,630 | $42,058 | $45,460 |
| MA | $57,510 | $45,834 | $42,345 |
| FL | $46,360 | $39,430 | $38,115 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for health education specialists, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $64,070 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for health education specialists 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 Maryland, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $77,650.
- The price adjustment for health education specialists 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 — Florida anchors the bottom at $38,115. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for health education specialists are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $64,070. 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 health education specialists 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 $77,650, in Maryland. 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 health education specialists 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.