News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is the District of Columbia, at $105,390. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and New York comes out ahead, worth $69,515. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for news analysts, reporters, and journalists: the District of Columbia leads at $105,390 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting New York to $69,515 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
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
$62,200
People doing it
39,250
Highest paid
$105,390
DC
Best off, really
$69,515
NY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,240
Highest tenth
$144,140
Lowest, really
$33,010
WV
States with data
48
National average
$102,460
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
107.63%
NY, 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 $33,010 up to $69,515.
- Only 39,250 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 48 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $62,200. 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 news analysts, reporters, and journalists approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $33,010 to $69,515, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in news analysts, reporters, and journalists is 39,250. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for news analysts, reporters, and journalists in 48 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: News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,240 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $62,200 |
| Top tenth earn over | $144,140 |
| This salary | $62,200 |
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 News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists
The national median for this job
$62,200around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,240 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $62,200 |
| Top tenth | $144,140 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $35,280 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $105,390 |
| Spread | $70,110 |
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 | $48,470 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $49,879 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NY | $100,770 | $74,817 | $69,515 |
| DC | $105,390 | $76,982 | $69,476 |
| NV | $78,550 | $64,090 | $66,086 |
| GA | $81,910 | $62,965 | $65,115 |
| RI | $74,570 | $58,914 | $58,093 |
| TN | $62,390 | $52,310 | $56,543 |
| MI | $62,760 | $50,191 | $53,290 |
| UT | $61,880 | $49,147 | $51,733 |
| NC | $58,670 | $47,489 | $50,446 |
| WI | $57,530 | $46,423 | $49,865 |
| NM | $54,610 | $44,658 | $49,408 |
| VA | $62,140 | $49,297 | $48,931 |
| MD | $63,680 | $50,686 | $48,753 |
| IL | $60,590 | $48,010 | $48,566 |
| CO | $60,770 | $49,043 | $48,375 |
| FL | $58,730 | $49,370 | $47,722 |
| LA | $50,750 | $41,821 | $47,339 |
| CT | $61,620 | $49,053 | $47,307 |
| ID | $51,190 | $41,451 | $45,339 |
| DE | $55,600 | $44,336 | $44,669 |
| NJ | $59,830 | $48,496 | $44,539 |
| OK | $48,210 | $39,248 | $44,455 |
| OH | $47,880 | $40,051 | $43,623 |
| MT | $47,960 | $39,218 | $43,458 |
| KY | $47,530 | $38,824 | $42,915 |
| SC | $47,940 | $39,837 | $42,754 |
| WA | $54,760 | $46,180 | $42,538 |
| IN | $47,610 | $39,060 | $42,371 |
| TX | $48,470 | $41,126 | $42,321 |
| MS | $45,240 | $36,813 | $42,172 |
| SD | $43,520 | $37,148 | $42,168 |
| MO | $46,920 | $38,612 | $42,079 |
| ND | $43,420 | $37,068 | $41,851 |
| ME | $50,090 | $40,366 | $41,573 |
| HI | $56,730 | $44,894 | $41,336 |
| KS | $45,870 | $36,766 | $40,867 |
| IA | $43,540 | $36,122 | $40,693 |
| VT | $46,970 | $38,603 | $39,947 |
| AL | $43,440 | $35,229 | $39,156 |
| NH | $48,450 | $41,110 | $39,024 |
| MN | $46,490 | $37,866 | $38,475 |
| NE | $40,420 | $33,522 | $37,092 |
| AK | $43,820 | $37,389 | $36,759 |
| OR | $49,200 | $37,957 | $36,246 |
| AR | $37,450 | $31,344 | $36,232 |
| AZ | $43,100 | $36,136 | $35,741 |
| WY | $36,040 | $31,138 | $34,275 |
| WV | $35,280 | $29,633 | $33,010 |
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 $62,200.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for this job, 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 the District of Columbia, at $76,982.
- 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 $33,010.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for news analysts, reporters, and journalists, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $62,200, 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.
- Retained-pay figures for news analysts, reporters, and journalists 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 $76,982, which leads in the District of Columbia.
- Real-terms results for news analysts, reporters, and journalists 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 $33,010. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.