Manicurists and Pedicurists
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for manicurists and pedicurists. Best paid: Hawaii, at $60,790. Tax does not change that. Best off: Nebraska, at $50,947 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- Hawaii's $60,790 median for manicurists and pedicurists survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: Nebraska takes the top position at $50,947. 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
$35,760
People doing it
152,770
Highest paid
$60,790
HI
Best off, really
$50,947
NE, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$28,920
Highest tenth
$50,140
Lowest, really
$23,812
GA
States with data
49
National average
$38,570
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.38%
NE, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $23,812 to $50,947.
- Roughly 152,770 people hold this job nationally, earning $35,760 in the middle. A solid, ordinary-sized job.
- This job is not published everywhere — 49 jurisdictions have a figure, with $35,760 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Hawaii tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in manicurists and pedicurists is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $23,812 to $50,947 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 152,770 are employed nationally in manicurists and pedicurists, placing it well inside the reported range without approaching the highest-headcount occupations.
- 49 jurisdictions carry a published median for manicurists and pedicurists. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Manicurists and Pedicurists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $28,920 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $35,760 |
| Top tenth earn over | $50,140 |
| This salary | $35,760 |
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 Manicurists and Pedicurists
The national median for this job
$35,760around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $28,920 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $35,760 |
| Top tenth | $50,140 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Manicurists and Pedicurists, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | New Mexico · $25,720 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $60,790 |
| Spread | $35,070 |
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 | $34,040 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $35,030 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NE | $56,940 | $46,044 | $50,947 |
| HI | $60,790 | $47,848 | $44,055 |
| SD | $45,310 | $38,587 | $43,801 |
| IA | $45,420 | $37,561 | $42,314 |
| KY | $45,310 | $37,118 | $41,029 |
| ME | $48,540 | $39,225 | $40,398 |
| AK | $47,890 | $40,660 | $39,974 |
| WA | $49,900 | $42,275 | $38,941 |
| NV | $41,880 | $35,831 | $36,946 |
| MO | $39,100 | $32,696 | $35,632 |
| WV | $38,260 | $31,934 | $35,572 |
| MS | $37,300 | $30,751 | $35,227 |
| OR | $46,080 | $35,723 | $34,113 |
| OH | $35,590 | $30,514 | $33,236 |
| WI | $36,680 | $30,697 | $32,974 |
| ND | $33,430 | $29,041 | $32,788 |
| IN | $36,140 | $30,182 | $32,741 |
| TN | $34,810 | $30,150 | $32,589 |
| MI | $36,890 | $30,504 | $32,388 |
| ID | $34,910 | $29,233 | $31,975 |
| FL | $37,840 | $32,584 | $31,497 |
| MT | $33,660 | $28,400 | $31,471 |
| SC | $33,810 | $28,972 | $31,094 |
| NC | $34,740 | $29,216 | $31,035 |
| CO | $37,110 | $31,073 | $30,650 |
| IL | $37,050 | $30,260 | $30,611 |
| MN | $36,040 | $30,029 | $30,512 |
| TX | $34,040 | $29,531 | $30,390 |
| VA | $36,630 | $30,267 | $30,042 |
| OK | $31,330 | $26,444 | $29,953 |
| AZ | $35,290 | $30,056 | $29,727 |
| MD | $37,300 | $30,742 | $29,570 |
| RI | $34,910 | $29,341 | $28,933 |
| NH | $35,100 | $30,383 | $28,841 |
| KS | $30,930 | $25,595 | $28,450 |
| NJ | $36,370 | $30,848 | $28,331 |
| CT | $34,720 | $29,215 | $28,176 |
| AL | $30,300 | $25,263 | $28,079 |
| DC | $36,620 | $30,573 | $27,592 |
| AR | $27,690 | $23,843 | $27,562 |
| LA | $28,170 | $24,349 | $27,561 |
| CA | $36,630 | $31,011 | $27,546 |
| MA | $35,470 | $29,227 | $27,002 |
| NY | $34,660 | $28,755 | $26,717 |
| DE | $31,200 | $26,084 | $26,281 |
| UT | $28,820 | $24,054 | $25,320 |
| NM | $25,720 | $22,576 | $24,977 |
| PA | $27,990 | $23,800 | $24,411 |
| GA | $26,910 | $23,026 | $23,812 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of manicurists and pedicurists 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 $35,760.
- Take-home figures for manicurists and pedicurists 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 Hawaii, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $47,848.
- The price adjustment for manicurists and pedicurists 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 — Georgia anchors the bottom at $23,812. 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 manicurists and pedicurists, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $35,760, 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 manicurists and pedicurists 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 $47,848, in Hawaii. 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 manicurists and pedicurists 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.