Interpreters and Translators
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays interpreters and translators the most, at $109,970. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $72,033 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- The District of Columbia leads for interpreters and translators at $109,970 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $72,033 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
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
$60,170
People doing it
52,060
Highest paid
$109,970
DC
Best off, really
$72,033
DC, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$37,070
Highest tenth
$103,660
Lowest, really
$31,613
HI
States with data
47
National average
$66,360
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 $31,613 to $72,033.
- This is a small job: about 52,060 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 47 jurisdictions have a figure, with $60,170 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. The District of Columbia tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in interpreters and translators 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 $31,613 to $72,033, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 52,060 workers, interpreters and translators 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.
- 47 jurisdictions carry a published median for interpreters and translators. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Interpreters and Translators
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $37,070 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $60,170 |
| Top tenth earn over | $103,660 |
| This salary | $60,170 |
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 Interpreters and Translators
The national median for this job
$60,170around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $37,070 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $60,170 |
| Top tenth | $103,660 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Interpreters and Translators, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Hawaii · $42,270 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $109,970 |
| Spread | $67,700 |
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 | $47,510 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $48,891 |
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 | $109,970 | $79,815 | $72,033 |
| MD | $88,550 | $67,282 | $64,716 |
| RI | $82,320 | $64,075 | $63,183 |
| NY | $84,090 | $64,043 | $59,506 |
| ID | $66,130 | $52,664 | $57,603 |
| NM | $63,550 | $51,421 | $56,891 |
| CO | $71,790 | $56,884 | $56,108 |
| OH | $61,230 | $50,411 | $54,907 |
| UT | $65,770 | $52,099 | $54,840 |
| WI | $63,390 | $50,805 | $54,572 |
| MN | $66,410 | $52,548 | $53,393 |
| MS | $57,130 | $45,891 | $52,572 |
| MA | $72,750 | $56,692 | $52,377 |
| VT | $62,450 | $50,347 | $52,100 |
| CT | $68,340 | $53,898 | $51,981 |
| ME | $63,470 | $50,214 | $51,715 |
| SD | $53,140 | $44,878 | $50,943 |
| MO | $57,010 | $46,245 | $50,397 |
| CA | $70,770 | $56,028 | $49,766 |
| VA | $63,030 | $49,961 | $49,590 |
| AR | $52,490 | $42,872 | $49,559 |
| KY | $53,590 | $43,482 | $48,063 |
| GA | $57,880 | $46,397 | $47,981 |
| OR | $66,300 | $50,201 | $47,938 |
| WA | $61,750 | $51,796 | $47,711 |
| NE | $53,050 | $43,095 | $47,685 |
| PA | $57,040 | $46,261 | $47,447 |
| TN | $51,080 | $43,223 | $46,720 |
| ND | $48,190 | $40,901 | $46,178 |
| LA | $48,420 | $40,019 | $45,299 |
| OK | $48,980 | $39,832 | $45,117 |
| NH | $56,370 | $47,473 | $45,065 |
| SC | $50,860 | $41,989 | $45,064 |
| IA | $48,150 | $39,651 | $44,668 |
| IL | $55,290 | $44,013 | $44,523 |
| NV | $50,370 | $42,652 | $43,981 |
| NJ | $58,970 | $47,852 | $43,948 |
| NC | $50,030 | $40,892 | $43,438 |
| MT | $47,850 | $39,135 | $43,366 |
| IN | $48,140 | $39,470 | $42,816 |
| KS | $47,950 | $38,321 | $42,595 |
| TX | $47,510 | $40,354 | $41,527 |
| AL | $46,130 | $37,272 | $41,427 |
| AZ | $50,150 | $41,624 | $41,169 |
| FL | $48,930 | $41,495 | $40,111 |
| MI | $45,310 | $36,912 | $39,191 |
| HI | $42,270 | $34,334 | $31,613 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for interpreters and translators, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $60,170 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for interpreters and translators 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 $79,815.
- The price adjustment for interpreters and translators 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 — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $31,613. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for interpreters and translators are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $60,170. 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 interpreters and translators 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 $79,815, 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 interpreters and translators 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.