Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is California, at $56,880. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and South Dakota comes out ahead, worth $42,542. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for interviewers, except eligibility and loan: California leads at $56,880 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting South Dakota to $42,542 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
$45,920
People doing it
148,060
Highest paid
$56,880
CA
Best off, really
$42,542
SD, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$33,900
Highest tenth
$62,810
Lowest, really
$27,157
HI
States with data
50
National average
$47,240
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.09%
SD, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $27,157 to $42,542. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- 148,060 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $45,920. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $45,920. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, California pays most.
- Geographic dispersion in interviewers, except eligibility and loan is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $27,157 through $42,542. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- National employment in interviewers, except eligibility and loan is 148,060 — 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.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for interviewers, except eligibility and loan in 50 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $33,900 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $45,920 |
| Top tenth earn over | $62,810 |
| This salary | $45,920 |
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 Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan
The national median for this job
$45,920around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $33,900 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $45,920 |
| Top tenth | $62,810 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alabama · $34,180 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $56,880 |
| Spread | $22,700 |
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 | $43,980 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $45,259 |
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 | $43,930 | $37,478 | $42,542 |
| VT | $49,480 | $40,536 | $41,947 |
| NY | $55,410 | $44,307 | $41,167 |
| MN | $49,980 | $40,464 | $41,115 |
| CA | $56,880 | $46,278 | $41,106 |
| WI | $46,070 | $37,780 | $40,581 |
| NE | $44,130 | $36,334 | $40,203 |
| RI | $49,780 | $40,731 | $40,164 |
| CO | $49,660 | $40,605 | $40,052 |
| WA | $51,090 | $43,231 | $39,821 |
| AK | $47,630 | $40,451 | $39,769 |
| DE | $49,010 | $39,406 | $39,703 |
| NH | $48,890 | $41,463 | $39,359 |
| MT | $42,970 | $35,444 | $39,275 |
| OH | $42,480 | $35,861 | $39,059 |
| TX | $43,980 | $37,518 | $38,609 |
| MI | $44,180 | $36,052 | $38,278 |
| WY | $40,050 | $34,360 | $37,822 |
| ND | $38,590 | $33,187 | $37,469 |
| CT | $47,980 | $38,823 | $37,442 |
| MA | $50,340 | $40,431 | $37,354 |
| NV | $42,340 | $36,200 | $37,327 |
| OR | $50,730 | $39,053 | $37,292 |
| IA | $39,520 | $33,044 | $37,226 |
| PA | $44,070 | $36,237 | $37,166 |
| MD | $47,550 | $38,491 | $37,023 |
| KY | $40,490 | $33,414 | $36,935 |
| ME | $43,830 | $35,759 | $36,828 |
| OK | $39,130 | $32,361 | $36,654 |
| TN | $39,340 | $33,790 | $36,523 |
| IN | $40,510 | $33,564 | $36,410 |
| DC | $49,730 | $40,320 | $36,389 |
| NJ | $47,380 | $39,180 | $35,983 |
| AR | $37,150 | $31,114 | $35,967 |
| FL | $43,500 | $37,132 | $35,893 |
| AZ | $43,200 | $36,214 | $35,818 |
| VA | $44,280 | $35,974 | $35,706 |
| ID | $39,450 | $32,641 | $35,702 |
| KS | $39,430 | $31,950 | $35,514 |
| MO | $38,940 | $32,575 | $35,500 |
| UT | $41,530 | $33,701 | $35,474 |
| LA | $37,190 | $31,333 | $35,466 |
| SC | $38,830 | $32,906 | $35,315 |
| IL | $43,200 | $34,898 | $35,302 |
| GA | $41,450 | $34,016 | $35,177 |
| NC | $39,200 | $32,622 | $34,653 |
| WV | $36,480 | $30,560 | $34,041 |
| MS | $35,110 | $29,078 | $33,312 |
| AL | $34,180 | $28,199 | $31,343 |
| HI | $35,680 | $29,495 | $27,157 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $45,920 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for this job 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 California, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $46,278.
- The price adjustment for this job 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 $27,157. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for interviewers, except eligibility and loan are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $45,920. 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 interviewers, except eligibility and loan 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 $46,278, in California. 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 interviewers, except eligibility and loan 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.