Marriage and Family Therapists
What the pay figures show
- Hawaii pays marriage and family therapists the most, at $141,960. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $91,072 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Hawaii leads for marriage and family therapists at $141,960 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $91,072 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
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$66,940
People doing it
66,740
Highest paid
$141,960
HI
Best off, really
$91,072
HI, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$44,650
Highest tenth
$123,730
Lowest, really
$33,938
WI
States with data
45
National average
$76,960
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.61%
HI, 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 $33,938 to $91,072.
- This is a small job: about 66,740 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 45 jurisdictions, averaging $66,940 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. Hawaii leads the published set.
- Interstate variation in marriage and family therapists 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 $33,938 to $91,072, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 66,740 workers, marriage and family therapists 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.
- Coverage for marriage and family therapists runs to 45 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: Marriage and Family Therapists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $44,650 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $66,940 |
| Top tenth earn over | $123,730 |
| This salary | $66,940 |
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 Marriage and Family Therapists
The national median for this job
$66,940around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $44,650 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $66,940 |
| Top tenth | $123,730 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Marriage and Family Therapists, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Wisconsin · $37,870 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $141,960 |
| Spread | $104,090 |
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 | $46,300 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $47,646 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| HI | $141,960 | $98,912 | $91,072 |
| GA | $91,550 | $69,266 | $71,630 |
| UT | $84,980 | $64,832 | $68,243 |
| NJ | $92,150 | $69,978 | $64,269 |
| CT | $86,250 | $65,513 | $63,182 |
| OR | $91,520 | $65,757 | $62,792 |
| NM | $70,630 | $56,364 | $62,360 |
| OH | $70,240 | $57,029 | $62,115 |
| IA | $67,180 | $54,150 | $61,003 |
| VA | $79,900 | $61,206 | $60,751 |
| AR | $64,340 | $51,955 | $60,058 |
| KS | $68,710 | $53,622 | $59,603 |
| DE | $76,580 | $58,881 | $59,324 |
| ME | $71,680 | $55,739 | $57,405 |
| MN | $72,470 | $56,408 | $57,315 |
| NE | $62,610 | $50,342 | $55,703 |
| ID | $62,700 | $50,090 | $54,788 |
| PA | $66,040 | $53,216 | $54,580 |
| MO | $60,440 | $48,840 | $53,225 |
| MD | $69,900 | $55,048 | $52,949 |
| AZ | $65,290 | $53,411 | $52,827 |
| OK | $57,670 | $46,423 | $52,583 |
| VT | $62,780 | $50,591 | $52,352 |
| WV | $55,700 | $45,250 | $50,406 |
| IN | $56,810 | $46,180 | $50,096 |
| AK | $60,010 | $50,398 | $49,548 |
| MA | $67,370 | $53,176 | $49,129 |
| IL | $60,970 | $48,296 | $48,856 |
| SC | $55,430 | $45,359 | $48,680 |
| CO | $60,700 | $48,990 | $48,322 |
| NH | $60,030 | $50,414 | $47,856 |
| CA | $67,300 | $53,864 | $47,845 |
| MS | $51,440 | $41,546 | $47,595 |
| NY | $64,430 | $51,067 | $47,449 |
| KY | $52,420 | $42,582 | $47,069 |
| WA | $60,000 | $50,390 | $46,416 |
| FL | $56,400 | $47,497 | $45,913 |
| MI | $52,270 | $42,208 | $44,815 |
| AL | $49,990 | $40,203 | $44,685 |
| SD | $44,870 | $38,233 | $43,400 |
| TN | $46,700 | $39,703 | $42,916 |
| MT | $46,960 | $38,462 | $42,620 |
| NC | $48,100 | $39,418 | $41,872 |
| TX | $46,300 | $39,382 | $40,527 |
| WI | $37,870 | $31,595 | $33,938 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for marriage and family therapists as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $66,940, 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 marriage and family therapists, 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 Hawaii, at $98,912.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for marriage and family therapists. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Wisconsin, on $33,938.
- These are distribution medians for marriage and family therapists, with a national value of $66,940. 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 marriage and family therapists 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 $98,912, which leads in Hawaii.
- Real-terms results for marriage and family therapists rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Wisconsin anchors the distribution at $33,938. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.