Public Relations Specialists
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia comes first for public relations specialists on every measure. $102,740 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $67,997 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For public relations specialists, the District of Columbia's $102,740 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $67,997. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$74,750
People doing it
283,380
Highest paid
$102,740
DC
Best off, really
$67,997
DC, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$44,110
Highest tenth
$135,150
Lowest, really
$46,125
HI
States with data
51
National average
$84,120
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
110.8%
DC, 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 $46,125 and $67,997. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- 283,380 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $74,750. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $74,750, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Interstate variation for public relations specialists is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $46,125 to $67,997. 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.
- National employment in public relations specialists is 283,380 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for public relations specialists, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Public Relations Specialists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $44,110 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $74,750 |
| Top tenth earn over | $135,150 |
| This salary | $74,750 |
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 Specialists
The national median for this job
$74,750around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $44,110 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $74,750 |
| Top tenth | $135,150 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Public Relations Specialists, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $56,730 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $102,740 |
| Spread | $46,010 |
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 | $65,160 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $67,054 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC | $102,740 | $75,343 | $67,997 |
| ND | $70,280 | $58,161 | $65,665 |
| WA | $87,470 | $70,365 | $64,816 |
| NV | $73,840 | $60,776 | $62,669 |
| CT | $84,990 | $64,696 | $62,394 |
| WY | $67,490 | $56,309 | $61,982 |
| CO | $80,680 | $62,747 | $61,892 |
| SD | $64,520 | $54,022 | $61,322 |
| VA | $80,380 | $61,516 | $61,059 |
| NM | $68,700 | $55,097 | $60,958 |
| AR | $65,000 | $52,461 | $60,643 |
| RI | $77,540 | $60,892 | $60,044 |
| IL | $76,380 | $58,927 | $59,610 |
| GA | $73,200 | $57,272 | $59,227 |
| MD | $79,560 | $61,385 | $59,044 |
| DE | $76,120 | $58,588 | $59,028 |
| OK | $64,920 | $51,922 | $58,811 |
| OH | $64,840 | $53,212 | $57,958 |
| NY | $81,250 | $62,199 | $57,792 |
| CA | $85,030 | $64,833 | $57,588 |
| WI | $67,240 | $53,596 | $57,570 |
| IA | $62,970 | $50,995 | $57,449 |
| NH | $73,280 | $60,382 | $57,319 |
| NC | $67,230 | $53,953 | $57,312 |
| NJ | $80,130 | $62,287 | $57,206 |
| AK | $70,050 | $58,110 | $57,130 |
| IN | $64,900 | $52,442 | $56,889 |
| MT | $63,780 | $51,185 | $56,718 |
| KS | $64,860 | $50,964 | $56,649 |
| MA | $79,660 | $61,208 | $56,549 |
| TX | $65,160 | $54,536 | $56,121 |
| LA | $60,470 | $49,340 | $55,849 |
| MI | $65,300 | $52,124 | $55,343 |
| TN | $60,900 | $51,113 | $55,249 |
| NE | $61,780 | $49,713 | $55,007 |
| MS | $59,810 | $47,937 | $54,916 |
| VT | $66,060 | $53,010 | $54,856 |
| MN | $68,620 | $53,961 | $54,829 |
| AL | $61,710 | $49,105 | $54,579 |
| SC | $62,730 | $50,740 | $54,456 |
| AZ | $66,710 | $54,495 | $53,900 |
| MO | $61,130 | $49,362 | $53,794 |
| KY | $60,150 | $48,523 | $53,635 |
| ID | $61,110 | $48,896 | $53,482 |
| OR | $74,900 | $55,519 | $53,016 |
| UT | $62,670 | $49,747 | $52,364 |
| FL | $63,660 | $53,331 | $51,551 |
| WV | $56,730 | $46,034 | $51,279 |
| ME | $62,450 | $49,463 | $50,942 |
| PA | $57,460 | $46,585 | $47,780 |
| HI | $63,880 | $50,096 | $46,125 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for public relations specialists, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $74,750 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for public relations specialists 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 $75,343.
- The price adjustment for public relations specialists 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 $46,125. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for public relations specialists are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $74,750. 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.
- Take-home calculations for public relations specialists 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 $75,343, 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 specialists 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.