Postmasters and Mail Superintendents
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is Florida, at $102,880. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Arkansas comes out ahead, worth $86,149. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for postmasters and mail superintendents: Florida leads at $102,880 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Arkansas to $86,149 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
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$96,660
People doing it
13,810
Highest paid
$102,880
FL
Best off, really
$86,149
AR, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$85,090
Highest tenth
$111,740
Lowest, really
$49,019
AK
States with data
50
National average
$97,360
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
86.51%
AR, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- The state you work in changes what this job pays, but less than you would expect. Level out tax and prices and the whole country sits between $49,019 and $86,149. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- This is a small job: about 13,810 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $96,660. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Florida pays most.
- Interstate variation for postmasters and mail superintendents is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $49,019 to $86,149. A differential of this magnitude is real but rarely decisive on its own, which is worth stating plainly against wage tables that present nominal gaps without either adjustment.
- With 13,810 workers, postmasters and mail superintendents 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.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for postmasters and mail superintendents 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: Postmasters and Mail Superintendents
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $85,090 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $96,660 |
| Top tenth earn over | $111,740 |
| This salary | $96,660 |
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 Postmasters and Mail Superintendents
The national median for this job
$96,660around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $85,090 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $96,660 |
| Top tenth | $111,740 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Postmasters and Mail Superintendents, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alaska · $59,340 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Florida · $102,880 |
| Spread | $43,540 |
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 | $97,550 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $100,386 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AR | $97,880 | $74,526 | $86,149 |
| TN | $99,170 | $78,596 | $84,955 |
| LA | $96,550 | $74,243 | $84,037 |
| SD | $91,540 | $73,228 | $83,124 |
| KY | $98,570 | $74,842 | $82,727 |
| MS | $95,270 | $72,134 | $82,635 |
| OH | $97,680 | $75,578 | $82,318 |
| OK | $96,080 | $72,599 | $82,232 |
| IN | $98,680 | $75,370 | $81,760 |
| ND | $91,040 | $72,361 | $81,697 |
| WV | $96,260 | $73,029 | $81,350 |
| IA | $93,160 | $71,440 | $80,480 |
| AL | $95,740 | $72,173 | $80,219 |
| TX | $97,550 | $77,456 | $79,708 |
| SC | $98,940 | $74,246 | $79,682 |
| MO | $95,680 | $72,581 | $79,097 |
| NE | $94,040 | $71,412 | $79,016 |
| FL | $102,880 | $81,206 | $78,496 |
| MI | $97,790 | $73,720 | $78,272 |
| WI | $96,810 | $72,643 | $78,030 |
| WY | $88,040 | $70,766 | $77,895 |
| NC | $96,410 | $73,316 | $77,881 |
| UT | $98,570 | $73,788 | $77,670 |
| NM | $91,500 | $70,048 | $77,498 |
| KS | $93,080 | $69,406 | $77,148 |
| ID | $92,820 | $70,063 | $76,634 |
| PA | $97,530 | $74,448 | $76,357 |
| AZ | $99,050 | $76,438 | $75,603 |
| GA | $97,050 | $72,861 | $75,348 |
| MT | $88,920 | $67,722 | $75,043 |
| RI | $99,900 | $75,717 | $74,663 |
| NV | $89,770 | $71,983 | $74,225 |
| DE | $98,550 | $72,887 | $73,435 |
| IL | $94,970 | $71,085 | $71,909 |
| ME | $93,000 | $69,248 | $71,319 |
| VT | $89,890 | $68,245 | $70,622 |
| NH | $92,980 | $74,241 | $70,475 |
| CT | $97,880 | $73,055 | $70,456 |
| VA | $94,790 | $70,825 | $70,298 |
| MN | $92,410 | $69,080 | $70,191 |
| WA | $95,430 | $75,965 | $69,974 |
| CO | $93,000 | $70,872 | $69,906 |
| NJ | $101,100 | $75,704 | $69,528 |
| MD | $94,890 | $71,441 | $68,717 |
| NY | $97,640 | $72,799 | $67,641 |
| MA | $96,870 | $72,455 | $66,940 |
| HI | $99,070 | $72,440 | $66,698 |
| CA | $101,150 | $74,674 | $66,329 |
| OR | $93,180 | $66,779 | $63,769 |
| AK | $59,340 | $49,860 | $49,019 |
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 $96,660 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- 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 Florida, at $81,206.
- The price adjustment for this job 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 — Alaska anchors the bottom at $49,019. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for postmasters and mail superintendents are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $96,660. 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.
- Retained-pay figures for postmasters and mail superintendents 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 $81,206, which leads in Florida.
- Real-terms figures for postmasters and mail superintendents 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.