Interior Designers
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays interior designers the most, at $98,450. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $84,137 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- The District of Columbia leads for interior designers at $98,450 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $84,137 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
$67,190
People doing it
71,500
Highest paid
$98,450
DC
Best off, really
$84,137
WY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$41,420
Highest tenth
$114,140
Lowest, really
$40,860
MS
States with data
49
National average
$74,540
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.85%
WY, 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 $40,860 to $84,137.
- This is a small job: about 71,500 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 49 jurisdictions have a figure, with $67,190 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. The District of Columbia tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in interior designers 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 $40,860 to $84,137, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 71,500 workers, interior designers 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.
- 49 jurisdictions carry a published median for interior designers. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Interior Designers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $41,420 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $67,190 |
| Top tenth earn over | $114,140 |
| This salary | $67,190 |
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 Interior Designers
The national median for this job
$67,190around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $41,420 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $67,190 |
| Top tenth | $114,140 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Interior Designers, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $43,740 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $98,450 |
| Spread | $54,710 |
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 | $65,160 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $67,054 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| WY | $96,100 | $76,436 | $84,137 |
| DC | $98,450 | $72,690 | $65,602 |
| AR | $69,990 | $55,937 | $64,661 |
| SD | $65,220 | $54,584 | $61,961 |
| OK | $68,520 | $54,451 | $61,676 |
| CO | $78,390 | $61,237 | $60,402 |
| IL | $76,290 | $58,868 | $59,550 |
| GA | $71,760 | $56,331 | $58,254 |
| MN | $73,270 | $56,916 | $57,832 |
| WA | $76,570 | $62,697 | $57,752 |
| TN | $63,660 | $53,331 | $57,646 |
| NE | $64,870 | $52,055 | $57,598 |
| MA | $80,110 | $61,502 | $56,821 |
| ND | $59,190 | $49,739 | $56,157 |
| TX | $65,160 | $54,536 | $56,121 |
| LA | $60,610 | $49,448 | $55,972 |
| SC | $63,790 | $51,522 | $55,294 |
| OH | $61,410 | $50,551 | $55,059 |
| MT | $61,770 | $49,666 | $55,035 |
| CA | $80,230 | $61,902 | $54,985 |
| IN | $62,580 | $50,646 | $54,941 |
| NM | $60,850 | $49,379 | $54,631 |
| NY | $75,580 | $58,516 | $54,370 |
| WI | $62,740 | $50,322 | $54,053 |
| AL | $61,050 | $48,603 | $54,022 |
| NJ | $74,020 | $58,361 | $53,600 |
| KS | $61,090 | $48,146 | $53,516 |
| IA | $58,040 | $47,221 | $53,197 |
| VT | $63,870 | $51,395 | $53,184 |
| KY | $59,240 | $47,824 | $52,862 |
| NC | $61,400 | $49,574 | $52,660 |
| MO | $59,610 | $48,212 | $52,541 |
| AK | $63,320 | $53,058 | $52,163 |
| ME | $63,830 | $50,479 | $51,988 |
| PA | $62,400 | $50,403 | $51,695 |
| UT | $61,740 | $49,041 | $51,621 |
| CT | $67,330 | $53,244 | $51,349 |
| NH | $64,140 | $53,716 | $50,991 |
| MI | $59,340 | $47,588 | $50,527 |
| AZ | $61,460 | $50,429 | $49,878 |
| MD | $65,070 | $51,737 | $49,763 |
| FL | $60,860 | $51,081 | $49,377 |
| VA | $62,560 | $49,610 | $49,242 |
| DE | $60,360 | $47,896 | $48,257 |
| OR | $66,350 | $50,237 | $47,972 |
| RI | $58,100 | $47,105 | $46,449 |
| HI | $63,780 | $50,023 | $46,058 |
| WV | $49,800 | $40,759 | $45,402 |
| MS | $43,740 | $35,667 | $40,860 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of interior designers 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 $67,190.
- One filer, no dependants, nothing paid into a pension before tax — that is the household behind every take-home figure for interior designers. It is the simplest case on purpose, so the states can be compared against each other rather than against each other's family circumstances. City income taxes are not counted. On that household, Wyoming keeps the most at $76,436.
- The price adjustment for interior designers 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 — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $40,860. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for interior designers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $67,190, 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.
- The household modeled for interior designers is a single filer, standard deduction, no dependants, no pre-tax contributions. Holding the household constant is what makes the interstate comparison meaningful; it also means the absolute figures overstate liability for most real filers. On that basis Wyoming retains the most, $76,436. Municipal and school-district income taxes are not included in any state.
- Real-terms figures for interior designers 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.