Order Clerks
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for order clerks. Best paid: Massachusetts, at $55,040. Tax does not change that. Best off: South Dakota, at $46,264 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- Massachusetts's $55,040 median for order clerks survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: South Dakota takes the top position at $46,264. 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
$46,170
People doing it
75,200
Highest paid
$55,040
MA
Best off, really
$46,264
SD, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$35,530
Highest tenth
$63,530
Lowest, really
$31,838
AK
States with data
48
National average
$48,220
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.09%
SD, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $31,838 to $46,264. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- Just 75,200 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $46,170 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Massachusetts tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in order clerks is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $31,838 through $46,264. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- 75,200 are employed nationally in order clerks — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for order clerks. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Order Clerks
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $35,530 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $46,170 |
| Top tenth earn over | $63,530 |
| This salary | $46,170 |
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 Order Clerks
The national median for this job
$46,170around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $35,530 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $46,170 |
| Top tenth | $63,530 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Order Clerks, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Louisiana · $37,520 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Massachusetts · $55,040 |
| Spread | $17,520 |
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 | $44,280 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $45,567 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| SD | $48,010 | $40,756 | $46,264 |
| AL | $48,840 | $39,330 | $43,715 |
| OK | $45,850 | $37,458 | $42,428 |
| VT | $49,950 | $40,898 | $42,322 |
| OH | $46,120 | $38,685 | $42,136 |
| WI | $47,750 | $39,047 | $41,942 |
| IA | $44,980 | $37,224 | $41,934 |
| WV | $45,320 | $37,348 | $41,603 |
| MA | $55,040 | $43,973 | $40,626 |
| KS | $45,200 | $36,265 | $40,310 |
| MS | $43,040 | $35,133 | $40,248 |
| NC | $46,060 | $37,860 | $40,217 |
| NE | $44,060 | $36,281 | $40,145 |
| AR | $41,760 | $34,648 | $40,051 |
| AZ | $48,590 | $40,410 | $39,968 |
| CO | $49,530 | $40,506 | $39,954 |
| MN | $48,400 | $39,299 | $39,931 |
| RI | $49,410 | $40,448 | $39,885 |
| ME | $47,750 | $38,644 | $39,799 |
| IN | $44,340 | $36,529 | $39,626 |
| PA | $46,840 | $38,378 | $39,362 |
| NH | $48,540 | $41,182 | $39,092 |
| TX | $44,280 | $37,759 | $38,857 |
| IL | $47,670 | $38,268 | $38,711 |
| MT | $42,000 | $34,710 | $38,462 |
| MI | $44,240 | $36,097 | $38,326 |
| NM | $41,020 | $34,343 | $37,996 |
| SC | $41,740 | $35,177 | $37,752 |
| WA | $47,990 | $40,740 | $37,527 |
| MD | $47,700 | $38,605 | $37,133 |
| CT | $47,500 | $38,459 | $37,090 |
| KY | $40,620 | $33,514 | $37,045 |
| OR | $50,260 | $38,716 | $36,971 |
| FL | $44,380 | $37,839 | $36,577 |
| TN | $39,160 | $33,645 | $36,367 |
| ID | $40,110 | $33,136 | $36,244 |
| NY | $48,320 | $38,993 | $36,230 |
| DC | $49,150 | $39,889 | $36,000 |
| NV | $40,560 | $34,770 | $35,853 |
| LA | $37,520 | $31,588 | $35,755 |
| GA | $41,720 | $34,219 | $35,387 |
| NJ | $46,270 | $38,349 | $35,221 |
| CA | $47,290 | $39,148 | $34,773 |
| HI | $46,760 | $37,619 | $34,637 |
| UT | $40,260 | $32,737 | $34,460 |
| VA | $42,580 | $34,705 | $34,447 |
| DE | $41,430 | $33,737 | $33,990 |
| AK | $37,590 | $32,384 | $31,838 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for order clerks as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $46,170, 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.
- Take-home figures for order clerks 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 Massachusetts, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $43,973.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for order clerks. 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 Alaska, on $31,838.
- These are distribution medians for order clerks, with a national value of $46,170. 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.
- Take-home calculations for order clerks 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 $43,973, in Massachusetts. 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 order clerks 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; Alaska anchors the distribution at $31,838. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.