Public Relations Managers
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays public relations managers the most, $197,600. It still pays the most after tax. What it does not do is stay ahead once you count what living there costs. Level that out and Virginia wins, at $121,505. Same work. A wage that goes further.
- For public relations managers, the District of Columbia leads both nominally at $197,600 and after tax — state income tax differentials are not large enough here to disturb the ordering. Regional price parity is: deflating take-home by each state's price level puts Virginia first at $121,505. The adjustment that matters for this occupation is therefore cost of living rather than tax, which is the opposite of the assumption most relocation comparisons start from.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$146,910
People doing it
74,850
Highest paid
$197,600
DC
Best off, really
$121,505
VA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$82,410
Highest tenth
$284,990
Lowest, really
$70,130
HI
States with data
48
National average
$164,760
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
100.75%
VA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $70,130 to $121,505.
- This is a small job: about 74,850 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $146,910 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. The District of Columbia tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in public relations managers pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $70,130 to $121,505, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 74,850 workers, public relations managers 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.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for public relations managers. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Public Relations Managers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $82,410 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $146,910 |
| Top tenth earn over | $284,990 |
| This salary | $146,910 |
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 Public Relations Managers
The national median for this job
$146,910around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $82,410 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $146,910 |
| Top tenth | $284,990 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Public Relations Managers, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $82,380 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $197,600 |
| Spread | $115,220 |
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 | $126,670 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $130,352 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| VA | $176,340 | $122,415 | $121,505 |
| DC | $197,600 | $133,310 | $120,312 |
| ME | $166,940 | $115,076 | $118,516 |
| NY | $180,880 | $124,698 | $115,862 |
| CO | $162,870 | $116,130 | $114,547 |
| NJ | $174,980 | $121,909 | $111,963 |
| MA | $171,740 | $120,383 | $111,221 |
| WA | $159,440 | $120,243 | $110,760 |
| RI | $156,080 | $111,885 | $110,328 |
| DE | $153,010 | $106,981 | $107,786 |
| TN | $127,390 | $98,337 | $106,293 |
| CT | $154,210 | $108,666 | $104,800 |
| KS | $129,760 | $93,005 | $103,379 |
| NC | $132,280 | $96,910 | $102,944 |
| MD | $149,380 | $106,358 | $102,301 |
| CA | $167,980 | $114,550 | $101,749 |
| IA | $120,730 | $89,788 | $101,150 |
| UT | $132,670 | $96,042 | $101,095 |
| TX | $126,670 | $97,845 | $100,689 |
| GA | $134,500 | $97,084 | $100,398 |
| MN | $139,040 | $98,218 | $99,798 |
| ND | $114,110 | $88,140 | $99,513 |
| OH | $118,670 | $89,767 | $97,773 |
| NH | $132,660 | $101,939 | $96,767 |
| IL | $131,990 | $95,092 | $96,194 |
| FL | $127,550 | $98,446 | $95,161 |
| NM | $115,260 | $85,599 | $94,703 |
| IN | $114,960 | $86,343 | $93,663 |
| KY | $112,320 | $84,034 | $92,888 |
| MO | $114,710 | $85,074 | $92,712 |
| MI | $117,900 | $87,013 | $92,386 |
| AK | $120,920 | $93,897 | $92,314 |
| NV | $114,130 | $89,120 | $91,896 |
| AR | $104,170 | $78,718 | $90,995 |
| PA | $118,050 | $88,254 | $90,517 |
| WI | $113,980 | $83,703 | $89,910 |
| NE | $104,440 | $78,255 | $86,588 |
| OR | $131,190 | $89,966 | $85,910 |
| AZ | $114,400 | $86,853 | $85,904 |
| MS | $97,160 | $73,388 | $84,071 |
| SC | $104,920 | $78,141 | $83,863 |
| MT | $99,990 | $74,884 | $82,980 |
| LA | $94,380 | $72,781 | $82,383 |
| OK | $96,030 | $72,566 | $82,195 |
| AL | $98,210 | $73,814 | $82,043 |
| ID | $98,160 | $73,536 | $80,434 |
| WV | $82,380 | $63,900 | $71,181 |
| HI | $105,010 | $76,167 | $70,130 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for public relations managers as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $146,910, 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 public relations managers 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $133,310.
- The price adjustment for public relations managers 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 — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $70,130. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for public relations managers, with a national value of $146,910. 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 public relations managers 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 $133,310, in the District of Columbia. 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 public relations managers 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.