Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is California, at $103,640. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Connecticut comes out ahead, worth $70,125. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for probation officers and correctional treatment specialists: California leads at $103,640 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Connecticut to $70,125 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
$66,270
People doing it
89,390
Highest paid
$103,640
CA
Best off, really
$70,125
CT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$46,840
Highest tenth
$107,790
Lowest, really
$32,437
MS
States with data
46
National average
$73,130
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
103.69%
CT, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $32,437 to $70,125.
- This is a small job: about 89,390 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 46 jurisdictions, averaging $66,270 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. California leads the published set.
- Geographic dispersion in probation officers and correctional treatment specialists is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $32,437 to $70,125 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- With 89,390 workers, probation officers and correctional treatment specialists 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.
- Coverage for probation officers and correctional treatment specialists runs to 46 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $46,840 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $66,270 |
| Top tenth earn over | $107,790 |
| This salary | $66,270 |
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 Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists
The national median for this job
$66,270around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $46,840 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $66,270 |
| Top tenth | $107,790 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists, state by state
The national median for this job
46states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $34,110 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $103,640 |
| Spread | $69,530 |
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 | $52,880 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $54,417 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| CT | $97,350 | $72,711 | $70,125 |
| IA | $77,390 | $60,945 | $68,657 |
| CA | $103,640 | $76,194 | $67,679 |
| VT | $83,820 | $64,376 | $66,617 |
| MI | $79,760 | $61,802 | $65,618 |
| MA | $94,590 | $70,965 | $65,563 |
| NV | $75,840 | $62,183 | $64,120 |
| SD | $66,870 | $55,873 | $63,424 |
| MN | $81,580 | $62,197 | $63,198 |
| DE | $81,880 | $62,260 | $62,728 |
| AK | $77,000 | $63,000 | $61,937 |
| WA | $82,750 | $67,045 | $61,757 |
| ND | $65,140 | $54,509 | $61,542 |
| NM | $66,000 | $53,275 | $58,941 |
| OR | $84,920 | $61,691 | $58,910 |
| IL | $74,390 | $57,626 | $58,293 |
| LA | $62,910 | $51,227 | $57,985 |
| NJ | $80,280 | $62,383 | $57,294 |
| NY | $80,350 | $61,614 | $57,249 |
| ME | $71,140 | $55,395 | $57,051 |
| MD | $76,390 | $59,305 | $57,044 |
| NE | $63,460 | $50,986 | $56,416 |
| CO | $71,680 | $56,811 | $56,037 |
| PA | $67,370 | $54,157 | $55,545 |
| OH | $61,120 | $50,325 | $54,814 |
| KS | $61,890 | $48,744 | $54,181 |
| AL | $61,050 | $48,603 | $54,022 |
| MT | $59,750 | $48,138 | $53,342 |
| NC | $62,220 | $50,200 | $53,325 |
| KY | $59,610 | $48,108 | $53,177 |
| IN | $60,170 | $48,781 | $52,917 |
| TN | $58,010 | $48,791 | $52,739 |
| WY | $56,580 | $47,642 | $52,441 |
| ID | $59,780 | $47,898 | $52,391 |
| HI | $73,830 | $56,602 | $52,115 |
| GA | $60,270 | $48,198 | $49,844 |
| SC | $56,780 | $46,354 | $49,748 |
| AZ | $60,910 | $50,001 | $49,454 |
| AR | $51,180 | $41,868 | $48,398 |
| WV | $53,120 | $43,286 | $48,218 |
| VA | $58,820 | $46,820 | $46,472 |
| OK | $50,380 | $40,894 | $46,320 |
| TX | $52,880 | $44,669 | $45,968 |
| MO | $46,840 | $38,552 | $42,013 |
| FL | $50,960 | $43,126 | $41,687 |
| MS | $34,110 | $28,315 | $32,437 |
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 $66,270 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 California, at $76,194.
- 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 Mississippi, on $32,437.
- All wage figures for probation officers and correctional treatment specialists are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $66,270. 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 probation officers and correctional treatment specialists 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 $76,194, which leads in California.
- Real-terms results for probation officers and correctional treatment specialists 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; Mississippi anchors the distribution at $32,437. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.