Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. The District of Columbia pays this job best, at $99,280. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $66,065 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for legal secretaries and administrative assistants is also the real leader: the District of Columbia at $99,280, holding through tax and through price deflation to $66,065. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$55,570
People doing it
156,280
Highest paid
$99,280
DC
Best off, really
$66,065
DC, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,500
Highest tenth
$91,730
Lowest, really
$33,179
KS
States with data
50
National average
$60,620
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 $33,179 to $66,065.
- 156,280 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $55,570. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 50 jurisdictions, averaging $55,570 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. The District of Columbia leads the published set.
- Interstate variation in legal secretaries and administrative assistants 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 $33,179 to $66,065, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- National employment in legal secretaries and administrative assistants is 156,280 — 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.
- Coverage for legal secretaries and administrative assistants runs to 50 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,500 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $55,570 |
| Top tenth earn over | $91,730 |
| This salary | $55,570 |
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 Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants
The national median for this job
$55,570around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,500 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $55,570 |
| Top tenth | $91,730 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Kansas · $36,620 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $99,280 |
| Spread | $62,660 |
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 | $45,940 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $47,276 |
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 | $99,280 | $73,203 | $66,065 |
| DE | $66,130 | $52,182 | $52,575 |
| NY | $72,230 | $56,340 | $52,348 |
| NM | $57,800 | $47,071 | $52,078 |
| ND | $53,540 | $45,199 | $51,031 |
| MN | $63,180 | $50,172 | $50,979 |
| CT | $66,220 | $52,496 | $50,628 |
| AK | $61,280 | $51,418 | $50,552 |
| RI | $63,020 | $50,873 | $50,165 |
| NV | $56,470 | $47,554 | $49,034 |
| MI | $56,870 | $45,709 | $48,531 |
| WI | $55,410 | $44,824 | $48,148 |
| CO | $59,490 | $48,071 | $47,416 |
| MD | $61,440 | $48,992 | $47,124 |
| NJ | $63,080 | $50,927 | $46,773 |
| SC | $52,840 | $43,449 | $46,631 |
| OH | $51,080 | $42,534 | $46,328 |
| SD | $47,790 | $40,579 | $46,063 |
| MA | $62,120 | $49,307 | $45,555 |
| WA | $58,360 | $49,072 | $45,202 |
| CA | $62,860 | $50,724 | $45,055 |
| AZ | $55,120 | $45,493 | $44,996 |
| LA | $48,050 | $39,733 | $44,975 |
| UT | $52,860 | $42,301 | $44,526 |
| WY | $46,960 | $39,912 | $43,933 |
| VA | $55,320 | $44,209 | $43,881 |
| OR | $59,610 | $45,411 | $43,364 |
| IA | $46,590 | $38,456 | $43,323 |
| PA | $51,430 | $41,925 | $43,000 |
| WV | $46,960 | $38,597 | $42,994 |
| IL | $52,790 | $42,128 | $42,616 |
| OK | $45,950 | $37,534 | $42,514 |
| IN | $47,740 | $39,160 | $42,481 |
| MS | $45,140 | $36,736 | $42,084 |
| TN | $45,340 | $38,611 | $41,735 |
| VT | $49,090 | $40,236 | $41,637 |
| NE | $45,800 | $37,600 | $41,604 |
| NH | $51,830 | $43,825 | $41,602 |
| AL | $45,950 | $37,135 | $41,275 |
| GA | $48,460 | $39,298 | $40,640 |
| TX | $45,940 | $39,093 | $40,229 |
| ME | $48,040 | $38,857 | $40,019 |
| FL | $48,510 | $41,158 | $39,784 |
| AR | $41,410 | $34,379 | $39,741 |
| NC | $43,720 | $36,073 | $38,319 |
| ID | $41,880 | $34,464 | $37,697 |
| HI | $49,460 | $39,594 | $36,455 |
| KY | $39,300 | $32,500 | $35,924 |
| MO | $38,560 | $32,288 | $35,187 |
| KS | $36,620 | $29,849 | $33,179 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of this job 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 $55,570.
- 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $73,203.
- 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 — Kansas anchors the bottom at $33,179. 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 legal secretaries and administrative assistants, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $55,570, 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.
- Take-home calculations for legal secretaries and administrative assistants 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 $73,203, 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 legal secretaries and administrative assistants 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.