Orderlies
What the pay figures show
- California pays orderlies the most on paper: $49,920. Two things happen before that money is yours. State tax takes a share, which puts Washington in front. Then local prices decide what is left, and Vermont wins at $40,864. The best offer and the best deal are not the same place.
- For orderlies, California's $49,920 median leads nominally and survives neither adjustment. State income tax differentials alone are sufficient to promote Washington; regional price parity then promotes Vermont, whose $40,864 real figure is the highest purchasing power available in this occupation. Nominal wage comparisons across states are therefore a poor guide to relocation, and the error compounds rather than cancels.
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
$38,290
People doing it
52,440
Highest paid
$49,920
CA
Best off, really
$40,864
VT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$32,240
Highest tenth
$50,600
Lowest, really
$26,807
LA
States with data
47
National average
$40,660
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.64%
VT, 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 $26,807 to $40,864. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- Only 52,440 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- This job is not published everywhere — 47 jurisdictions have a figure, with $38,290 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. California tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in orderlies is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $26,807 through $40,864. 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.
- National employment in orderlies is 52,440. ⚠️ 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.
- 47 jurisdictions carry a published median for orderlies. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Orderlies
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $32,240 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $38,290 |
| Top tenth earn over | $50,600 |
| This salary | $38,290 |
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 Orderlies
The national median for this job
$38,290around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $32,240 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $38,290 |
| Top tenth | $50,600 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Orderlies, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Louisiana · $27,330 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $49,920 |
| Spread | $22,590 |
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 | $37,650 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $38,745 |
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 | $48,120 | $39,489 | $40,864 |
| WA | $48,690 | $41,302 | $38,045 |
| ND | $38,240 | $32,906 | $37,152 |
| MN | $44,550 | $36,411 | $36,997 |
| WI | $41,380 | $34,242 | $36,781 |
| CA | $49,920 | $41,103 | $36,510 |
| ME | $42,530 | $34,797 | $35,837 |
| DE | $43,800 | $35,509 | $35,777 |
| CO | $43,570 | $35,980 | $35,489 |
| WY | $37,410 | $32,239 | $35,487 |
| NM | $37,650 | $31,780 | $35,160 |
| ID | $38,650 | $32,040 | $35,045 |
| NY | $46,600 | $37,704 | $35,032 |
| IA | $36,850 | $31,000 | $34,923 |
| HI | $47,130 | $37,889 | $34,886 |
| IN | $38,540 | $32,039 | $34,756 |
| OH | $37,030 | $31,632 | $34,453 |
| NC | $38,680 | $32,225 | $34,231 |
| PA | $40,140 | $33,200 | $34,051 |
| KS | $37,140 | $30,238 | $33,611 |
| OR | $45,120 | $35,036 | $33,457 |
| TX | $37,650 | $32,432 | $33,375 |
| SC | $36,480 | $31,064 | $33,339 |
| AK | $39,410 | $33,846 | $33,275 |
| NH | $40,850 | $35,003 | $33,227 |
| MO | $35,620 | $30,064 | $32,763 |
| RI | $39,830 | $33,110 | $32,649 |
| OK | $34,430 | $28,796 | $32,616 |
| KY | $35,260 | $29,395 | $32,492 |
| IL | $39,450 | $32,070 | $32,442 |
| NV | $35,850 | $30,985 | $31,950 |
| MI | $36,220 | $29,994 | $31,846 |
| AZ | $37,380 | $31,683 | $31,337 |
| GA | $36,100 | $29,984 | $31,007 |
| AR | $31,540 | $26,814 | $30,996 |
| VA | $36,960 | $30,513 | $30,286 |
| MD | $38,210 | $31,430 | $30,232 |
| CT | $37,550 | $31,227 | $30,116 |
| TN | $31,840 | $27,763 | $30,010 |
| WV | $31,770 | $26,924 | $29,991 |
| NJ | $38,670 | $32,615 | $29,955 |
| FL | $35,420 | $30,640 | $29,618 |
| MA | $38,970 | $31,864 | $29,439 |
| DC | $39,250 | $32,528 | $29,357 |
| AL | $31,310 | $26,027 | $28,929 |
| MS | $29,790 | $25,017 | $28,659 |
| LA | $27,330 | $23,683 | $26,807 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of orderlies 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 $38,290.
- Take-home figures for orderlies 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $41,302.
- The price adjustment for orderlies 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 — Louisiana anchors the bottom at $26,807. 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 orderlies, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $38,290, 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 orderlies 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 $41,302, in Washington. 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 orderlies 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.