Human Resources Specialists
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays human resources specialists the most, at $110,970. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $72,591 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- The District of Columbia leads for human resources specialists at $110,970 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $72,591 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$75,940
People doing it
912,430
Highest paid
$110,970
DC
Best off, really
$72,591
DC, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$47,180
Highest tenth
$128,720
Lowest, really
$51,791
AR
States with data
51
National average
$81,990
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
110.8%
DC, 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 $51,791 to $72,591.
- 912,430 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $75,940. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $75,940, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Interstate variation in human resources specialists 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 $51,791 to $72,591, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- National employment in human resources specialists is 912,430 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for human resources specialists, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Human Resources Specialists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $47,180 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $75,940 |
| Top tenth earn over | $128,720 |
| This salary | $75,940 |
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 Human Resources Specialists
The national median for this job
$75,940around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $47,180 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $75,940 |
| Top tenth | $128,720 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Human Resources Specialists, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $55,010 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $110,970 |
| Spread | $55,960 |
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 | $68,920 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $70,924 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC | $110,970 | $80,433 | $72,591 |
| ND | $75,630 | $61,820 | $69,796 |
| SD | $67,590 | $56,380 | $63,999 |
| WA | $84,550 | $68,311 | $62,923 |
| VT | $77,800 | $60,538 | $62,646 |
| VA | $82,090 | $62,621 | $62,155 |
| OH | $70,180 | $56,988 | $62,070 |
| CO | $80,840 | $62,852 | $61,996 |
| AK | $76,990 | $62,992 | $61,930 |
| MD | $83,910 | $64,239 | $61,789 |
| WY | $66,970 | $55,943 | $61,579 |
| NC | $73,070 | $57,828 | $61,428 |
| MN | $78,760 | $60,405 | $61,377 |
| KS | $70,870 | $55,021 | $61,158 |
| CT | $82,890 | $63,334 | $61,081 |
| NV | $71,610 | $59,208 | $61,051 |
| KY | $69,010 | $55,081 | $60,884 |
| TN | $67,370 | $56,225 | $60,774 |
| IA | $66,710 | $53,837 | $60,650 |
| NM | $68,050 | $54,671 | $60,486 |
| MA | $85,630 | $65,109 | $60,154 |
| RI | $77,560 | $60,905 | $60,057 |
| DE | $77,700 | $59,595 | $60,043 |
| IL | $76,820 | $59,215 | $59,901 |
| WI | $70,540 | $55,722 | $59,854 |
| WV | $66,860 | $53,693 | $59,810 |
| NY | $84,380 | $64,232 | $59,681 |
| UT | $71,750 | $56,113 | $59,065 |
| TX | $68,920 | $57,315 | $58,981 |
| MO | $66,990 | $53,746 | $58,571 |
| MI | $69,520 | $55,033 | $58,432 |
| PA | $70,450 | $56,229 | $57,671 |
| NJ | $80,690 | $62,645 | $57,535 |
| IN | $65,600 | $52,984 | $57,476 |
| GA | $70,570 | $55,553 | $57,450 |
| ME | $71,630 | $55,707 | $57,372 |
| AL | $64,940 | $51,558 | $57,306 |
| AZ | $71,390 | $57,671 | $57,040 |
| CA | $83,500 | $63,899 | $56,758 |
| MT | $63,790 | $51,192 | $56,726 |
| ID | $64,990 | $51,808 | $56,668 |
| LA | $61,300 | $49,982 | $56,576 |
| SC | $65,370 | $52,687 | $56,545 |
| OK | $61,630 | $49,427 | $55,985 |
| NH | $70,840 | $58,666 | $55,689 |
| MS | $60,300 | $48,311 | $55,344 |
| NE | $61,930 | $49,826 | $55,132 |
| OR | $78,060 | $57,465 | $54,875 |
| FL | $66,410 | $55,540 | $53,687 |
| HI | $73,750 | $56,551 | $52,069 |
| AR | $55,010 | $44,804 | $51,791 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for human resources specialists as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $75,940, 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 human resources 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $80,433.
- The price adjustment for human resources 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 — Arkansas anchors the bottom at $51,791. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for human resources specialists, with a national value of $75,940. 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 human resources 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 $80,433, 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 human resources 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.