Insurance Sales Agents
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for insurance sales agents is the District of Columbia, at $84,530. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and South Dakota comes out ahead, worth $67,512. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for insurance sales agents: the District of Columbia leads at $84,530 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting South Dakota to $67,512 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
$62,280
People doing it
479,100
Highest paid
$84,530
DC
Best off, really
$67,512
SD, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$37,330
Highest tenth
$138,140
Lowest, really
$37,970
DE
States with data
51
National average
$81,480
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.09%
SD, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Nationally, this job pays within a fairly narrow band. Adjust for tax and for local prices and the band tightens again, to between $37,970 and $67,512. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- 479,100 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $62,280. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $62,280 in the middle.
- Wages for insurance sales agents cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $37,970 to $67,512. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- National employment in insurance sales agents is 479,100 — 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.
- 51 jurisdictions report insurance sales agents, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Insurance Sales Agents
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $37,330 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $62,280 |
| Top tenth earn over | $138,140 |
| This salary | $62,280 |
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 Insurance Sales Agents
The national median for this job
$62,280around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $37,330 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $62,280 |
| Top tenth | $138,140 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Insurance Sales Agents, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | New Mexico · $45,180 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $84,530 |
| Spread | $39,350 |
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 | $51,180 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $52,668 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| SD | $71,990 | $59,475 | $67,512 |
| ND | $71,220 | $58,804 | $66,391 |
| WI | $79,450 | $61,461 | $66,018 |
| WY | $71,830 | $59,362 | $65,343 |
| RI | $79,930 | $62,483 | $61,613 |
| MN | $78,640 | $60,329 | $61,299 |
| PA | $73,370 | $58,193 | $59,685 |
| NJ | $81,640 | $63,253 | $58,093 |
| NH | $74,370 | $61,149 | $58,047 |
| VT | $70,720 | $56,024 | $57,975 |
| DC | $84,530 | $64,080 | $57,832 |
| AL | $65,510 | $51,991 | $57,787 |
| MA | $79,300 | $60,973 | $56,332 |
| CT | $74,840 | $58,114 | $56,046 |
| NY | $78,110 | $60,159 | $55,897 |
| MT | $62,040 | $49,870 | $55,261 |
| IA | $60,140 | $48,829 | $55,008 |
| OH | $61,260 | $50,434 | $54,932 |
| NE | $61,590 | $49,569 | $54,847 |
| KY | $60,880 | $49,084 | $54,256 |
| CO | $68,730 | $54,866 | $54,118 |
| IN | $61,360 | $49,702 | $53,916 |
| SC | $61,350 | $49,723 | $53,364 |
| AR | $56,720 | $46,114 | $53,307 |
| KS | $60,370 | $47,607 | $52,917 |
| CA | $76,120 | $59,363 | $52,729 |
| MI | $61,900 | $49,537 | $52,596 |
| MO | $58,990 | $47,743 | $52,029 |
| TN | $57,120 | $48,076 | $51,966 |
| LA | $55,440 | $45,449 | $51,445 |
| IL | $64,280 | $50,792 | $51,380 |
| ID | $58,510 | $46,945 | $51,348 |
| ME | $62,920 | $49,809 | $51,298 |
| UT | $61,230 | $48,654 | $51,213 |
| GA | $61,850 | $49,389 | $51,075 |
| NC | $58,710 | $47,520 | $50,478 |
| AZ | $61,560 | $50,507 | $49,955 |
| FL | $59,790 | $50,221 | $48,545 |
| VA | $60,520 | $48,089 | $47,731 |
| WA | $61,040 | $51,226 | $47,186 |
| HI | $64,170 | $50,307 | $46,319 |
| MD | $58,300 | $46,618 | $44,840 |
| OR | $61,680 | $46,893 | $44,779 |
| TX | $51,180 | $43,303 | $44,562 |
| MS | $47,930 | $38,867 | $44,525 |
| OK | $47,920 | $39,028 | $44,206 |
| NV | $49,100 | $41,632 | $42,928 |
| AK | $50,500 | $42,757 | $42,036 |
| WV | $45,480 | $37,470 | $41,739 |
| NM | $45,180 | $37,507 | $41,496 |
| DE | $46,710 | $37,686 | $37,970 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for insurance sales agents as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $62,280, 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 insurance sales agents 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 $64,080.
- Levelling out prices for insurance sales agents is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Delaware sits at the bottom on $37,970.
- These are distribution medians for insurance sales agents, with a national value of $62,280. 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 insurance sales agents 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 $64,080, 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.
- The price deflation applied to insurance sales agents uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Delaware at $37,970. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Delaware anchors the bottom at $37,970 — and the two source series are dated independently.