Reservation and Transportation Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. Michigan pays this job best, at $60,220. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $51,238 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for reservation and transportation ticket agents and travel clerks is also the real leader: Michigan at $60,220, holding through tax and through price deflation to $51,238. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$44,390
People doing it
118,710
Highest paid
$60,220
MI
Best off, really
$51,238
MI, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$32,140
Highest tenth
$78,150
Lowest, really
$30,032
NJ
States with data
50
National average
$49,630
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
94.18%
MI, 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 $30,032 to $51,238. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- 118,710 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $44,390. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $44,390. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Michigan pays most.
- Geographic dispersion in reservation and transportation ticket agents and travel clerks is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $30,032 through $51,238. 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 reservation and transportation ticket agents and travel clerks is 118,710 — 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.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for reservation and transportation ticket agents and travel clerks 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: Reservation and Transportation Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $32,140 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $44,390 |
| Top tenth earn over | $78,150 |
| This salary | $44,390 |
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 Reservation and Transportation Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks
The national median for this job
$44,390around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $32,140 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $44,390 |
| Top tenth | $78,150 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Reservation and Transportation Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $34,030 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Michigan · $60,220 |
| Spread | $26,190 |
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 | $38,220 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $39,331 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MI | $60,220 | $48,258 | $51,238 |
| MN | $60,090 | $47,900 | $48,670 |
| NM | $47,850 | $39,537 | $43,743 |
| OK | $47,340 | $38,588 | $43,708 |
| LA | $44,520 | $37,002 | $41,884 |
| KY | $45,840 | $37,526 | $41,479 |
| AR | $42,040 | $34,862 | $40,299 |
| GA | $47,860 | $38,846 | $40,172 |
| SC | $43,740 | $36,733 | $39,423 |
| MT | $43,110 | $35,549 | $39,393 |
| NC | $44,630 | $36,768 | $39,057 |
| IL | $47,850 | $38,404 | $38,848 |
| AK | $45,870 | $39,037 | $38,378 |
| WA | $48,520 | $41,166 | $37,919 |
| AZ | $45,710 | $38,168 | $37,751 |
| PA | $44,380 | $36,477 | $37,412 |
| CO | $45,960 | $37,795 | $37,280 |
| IN | $41,400 | $34,253 | $37,157 |
| RI | $45,420 | $37,392 | $36,871 |
| MO | $40,560 | $33,801 | $36,835 |
| ID | $40,230 | $33,226 | $36,342 |
| NV | $41,000 | $35,124 | $36,217 |
| CA | $49,420 | $40,731 | $36,179 |
| TN | $38,530 | $33,139 | $35,820 |
| MS | $37,730 | $31,079 | $35,603 |
| VA | $44,140 | $35,869 | $35,602 |
| DE | $43,140 | $35,016 | $35,279 |
| SD | $35,860 | $30,994 | $35,182 |
| IA | $36,880 | $31,023 | $34,949 |
| NE | $37,850 | $31,574 | $34,936 |
| ME | $40,700 | $33,432 | $34,432 |
| DC | $46,550 | $37,956 | $34,255 |
| ND | $34,870 | $30,198 | $34,094 |
| TX | $38,220 | $32,890 | $33,846 |
| OH | $36,070 | $30,887 | $33,641 |
| HI | $45,020 | $36,346 | $33,465 |
| AL | $36,620 | $30,049 | $33,399 |
| NH | $40,920 | $35,059 | $33,280 |
| UT | $38,660 | $31,523 | $33,181 |
| MA | $44,230 | $35,827 | $33,100 |
| VT | $38,310 | $31,935 | $33,047 |
| FL | $39,490 | $33,910 | $32,779 |
| NY | $42,990 | $34,998 | $32,518 |
| WI | $35,950 | $30,147 | $32,382 |
| MD | $40,750 | $33,351 | $32,079 |
| WV | $34,030 | $28,668 | $31,935 |
| KS | $34,940 | $28,593 | $31,783 |
| CT | $39,380 | $32,525 | $31,368 |
| OR | $40,570 | $31,778 | $30,346 |
| NJ | $38,780 | $32,700 | $30,032 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $44,390, 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 this job 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 Michigan, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $48,258.
- 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 — New Jersey anchors the bottom at $30,032. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for reservation and transportation ticket agents and travel clerks, with a national value of $44,390. 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 reservation and transportation ticket agents and travel clerks 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 $48,258, in Michigan. 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 reservation and transportation ticket agents and travel clerks 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.