Labor Relations Specialists
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for labor relations specialists. Best paid: New Jersey, at $118,370. Tax does not change that. Best off: North Dakota, at $89,558 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- New Jersey's $118,370 median for labor relations specialists survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: North Dakota takes the top position at $89,558. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
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
$95,420
People doing it
64,810
Highest paid
$118,370
NJ
Best off, really
$89,558
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$50,490
Highest tenth
$156,180
Lowest, really
$43,107
AL
States with data
51
National average
$98,720
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, 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 $43,107 to $89,558.
- This is a small job: about 64,810 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $95,420 in the middle.
- Interstate variation in labor relations 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 $43,107 to $89,558, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 64,810 workers, labor relations specialists 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.
- 51 jurisdictions report labor relations specialists, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Labor Relations Specialists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $50,490 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $95,420 |
| Top tenth earn over | $156,180 |
| This salary | $95,420 |
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 Labor Relations Specialists
The national median for this job
$95,420around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $50,490 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $95,420 |
| Top tenth | $156,180 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Labor Relations Specialists, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alabama · $48,120 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Jersey · $118,370 |
| Spread | $70,250 |
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 | $79,640 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $81,955 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ND | $101,220 | $79,324 | $89,558 |
| NJ | $118,370 | $86,753 | $79,675 |
| IL | $104,180 | $77,109 | $78,002 |
| MO | $93,840 | $71,373 | $77,781 |
| WY | $87,310 | $70,253 | $77,330 |
| WI | $95,750 | $71,961 | $77,296 |
| ID | $93,110 | $70,251 | $76,840 |
| MA | $111,260 | $81,858 | $75,628 |
| WA | $104,100 | $82,064 | $75,592 |
| MN | $100,760 | $74,386 | $75,583 |
| WV | $88,020 | $67,610 | $75,313 |
| DC | $115,600 | $83,297 | $75,175 |
| AZ | $97,070 | $75,094 | $74,274 |
| ME | $96,680 | $71,574 | $73,714 |
| VA | $98,730 | $73,370 | $72,825 |
| DE | $97,390 | $72,147 | $72,690 |
| PA | $91,320 | $70,270 | $72,072 |
| NM | $83,770 | $64,988 | $71,901 |
| NC | $86,270 | $66,587 | $70,733 |
| MS | $79,360 | $61,577 | $70,542 |
| NE | $81,910 | $63,430 | $70,185 |
| LA | $78,110 | $61,823 | $69,979 |
| IA | $79,140 | $62,109 | $69,969 |
| KS | $82,750 | $62,716 | $69,711 |
| OH | $80,150 | $63,728 | $69,411 |
| NY | $100,500 | $74,643 | $69,354 |
| CA | $105,810 | $77,519 | $68,856 |
| MD | $94,030 | $70,877 | $68,174 |
| TN | $76,930 | $62,950 | $68,043 |
| VT | $85,870 | $65,683 | $67,970 |
| RI | $88,030 | $67,878 | $66,933 |
| TX | $79,640 | $64,857 | $66,742 |
| CO | $87,150 | $67,014 | $66,100 |
| IN | $77,190 | $60,886 | $66,048 |
| SC | $78,050 | $60,879 | $65,337 |
| NV | $77,240 | $63,168 | $65,135 |
| NH | $84,780 | $68,473 | $64,999 |
| GA | $81,480 | $62,684 | $64,824 |
| KY | $73,550 | $58,116 | $64,239 |
| FL | $81,700 | $66,306 | $64,093 |
| AK | $77,870 | $63,612 | $62,539 |
| MT | $70,360 | $55,714 | $61,737 |
| MI | $73,760 | $57,836 | $61,408 |
| CT | $79,620 | $61,214 | $59,036 |
| AR | $62,070 | $50,215 | $58,047 |
| OK | $62,400 | $50,011 | $56,646 |
| OR | $80,490 | $58,962 | $56,304 |
| SD | $57,900 | $48,703 | $55,284 |
| HI | $77,310 | $58,785 | $54,126 |
| UT | $61,190 | $48,623 | $51,181 |
| AL | $48,120 | $38,783 | $43,107 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for labor relations specialists as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $95,420, 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.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for labor relations specialists, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is New Jersey, at $86,753.
- The price adjustment for labor relations 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 — Alabama anchors the bottom at $43,107. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for labor relations specialists, with a national value of $95,420. 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.
- Retained-pay figures for labor relations specialists model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $86,753, which leads in New Jersey.
- Real-terms figures for labor relations 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.