Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for this job. Best paid: the District of Columbia, at $76,970. Tax does not change that. Best off: Vermont, at $60,344 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- The District of Columbia's $76,970 median for meeting, convention, and event planners survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: Vermont takes the top position at $60,344. 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
$61,160
People doing it
142,860
Highest paid
$76,970
DC
Best off, really
$60,344
VT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,830
Highest tenth
$101,700
Lowest, really
$33,422
WV
States with data
50
National average
$66,520
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.64%
VT, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $33,422 up to $60,344.
- 142,860 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $61,160. 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 $61,160. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, The District of Columbia pays most.
- The nominal spread for meeting, convention, and event planners approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $33,422 to $60,344, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in meeting, convention, and event planners is 142,860 — 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 meeting, convention, and event planners 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: Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,830 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $61,160 |
| Top tenth earn over | $101,700 |
| This salary | $61,160 |
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 Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners
The national median for this job
$61,160around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,830 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $61,160 |
| Top tenth | $101,700 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $35,760 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $76,970 |
| Spread | $41,210 |
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 | $57,470 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $59,141 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| VT | $74,310 | $58,313 | $60,344 |
| LA | $61,150 | $49,866 | $56,444 |
| MA | $75,740 | $58,646 | $54,183 |
| NY | $74,730 | $57,964 | $53,857 |
| DC | $76,970 | $59,404 | $53,612 |
| CT | $70,010 | $54,981 | $53,025 |
| NJ | $72,780 | $57,557 | $52,862 |
| HI | $74,460 | $56,997 | $52,479 |
| WY | $55,550 | $46,814 | $51,530 |
| WA | $65,530 | $54,833 | $50,509 |
| NH | $63,250 | $53,001 | $50,312 |
| MO | $56,900 | $46,162 | $50,306 |
| AR | $53,040 | $43,294 | $50,046 |
| NV | $57,610 | $48,470 | $49,979 |
| CA | $71,120 | $56,246 | $49,960 |
| AZ | $61,330 | $50,328 | $49,778 |
| TX | $57,470 | $48,357 | $49,763 |
| ND | $51,700 | $43,721 | $49,362 |
| CO | $62,050 | $50,015 | $49,334 |
| FL | $60,270 | $50,607 | $48,918 |
| MD | $63,280 | $50,383 | $48,462 |
| PA | $58,170 | $47,134 | $48,342 |
| KS | $54,840 | $43,472 | $48,321 |
| VA | $60,930 | $48,394 | $48,035 |
| IL | $59,840 | $47,444 | $47,994 |
| RI | $59,910 | $48,491 | $47,816 |
| IA | $51,750 | $42,406 | $47,773 |
| TN | $52,000 | $43,962 | $47,519 |
| ME | $57,900 | $46,114 | $47,493 |
| NC | $54,990 | $44,679 | $47,461 |
| NE | $52,630 | $42,777 | $47,332 |
| WI | $53,940 | $43,715 | $46,957 |
| MN | $57,710 | $46,149 | $46,891 |
| AL | $52,180 | $41,867 | $46,534 |
| NM | $50,820 | $41,791 | $46,236 |
| SC | $51,830 | $42,705 | $45,832 |
| AK | $54,990 | $46,364 | $45,583 |
| UT | $54,150 | $43,280 | $45,557 |
| SD | $47,050 | $39,985 | $45,388 |
| OH | $49,900 | $41,619 | $45,330 |
| MI | $52,780 | $42,596 | $45,227 |
| OK | $48,990 | $39,839 | $45,125 |
| IN | $50,090 | $40,979 | $44,454 |
| KY | $49,280 | $40,169 | $44,402 |
| OR | $61,120 | $46,492 | $44,396 |
| MT | $49,000 | $40,005 | $44,330 |
| MS | $44,680 | $36,385 | $41,682 |
| GA | $49,250 | $39,894 | $41,255 |
| DE | $49,020 | $39,414 | $39,710 |
| WV | $35,760 | $30,004 | $33,422 |
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 $61,160 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $59,404.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. 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 West Virginia, on $33,422.
- All wage figures for meeting, convention, and event planners are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $61,160. 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 meeting, convention, and event planners 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 $59,404, 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 results for meeting, convention, and event planners 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; West Virginia anchors the distribution at $33,422. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.