Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel

What the pay figures show
- New York pays this job the most, at $92,190. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $64,377 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- New York leads for sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel at $92,190 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $64,377 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$69,990
People doing it
1,256,010
Highest paid
$92,190
NY
Best off, really
$64,377
NY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$37,980
Highest tenth
$148,840
Lowest, really
$42,521
HI
States with data
51
National average
$82,430
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
107.63%
NY, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $42,521 up to $64,377.
- Roughly 1,256,010 Americans do this job. Hold that scale in mind. A few thousand dollars here is a few thousand dollars across millions of households.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $69,990. Nothing is missing.
- The nominal spread for sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $42,521 to $64,377, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- With 1,256,010 workers nationally, sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel is one of the highest-headcount occupations BLS publishes. Aggregate effects of the differentials described above are correspondingly large, even where the per-worker figures appear modest.
- Coverage for sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel
The national median for this job
| Lowest tenth earn under | $37,980 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $69,990 |
| Top tenth earn over | $148,840 |
| This salary | $69,990 |
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 Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel
The national median for this job
| Lowest tenth | $37,980 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $69,990 |
| Top tenth | $148,840 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel, state by state
The national median for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $48,440 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New York · $92,190 |
| Spread | $43,750 |
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 | $61,680 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $63,473 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NY | $92,190 | $69,287 | $64,377 |
| RI | $81,450 | $63,496 | $62,612 |
| VT | $77,530 | $60,366 | $62,468 |
| ND | $66,060 | $55,230 | $62,356 |
| CO | $79,810 | $62,173 | $61,326 |
| MI | $73,380 | $57,585 | $61,141 |
| GA | $75,280 | $58,632 | $60,633 |
| WA | $79,920 | $65,054 | $59,923 |
| MN | $75,370 | $58,251 | $59,188 |
| MA | $83,760 | $63,887 | $59,025 |
| SD | $61,770 | $51,812 | $58,814 |
| AZ | $72,920 | $58,709 | $58,067 |
| CT | $76,940 | $59,476 | $57,360 |
| IA | $62,420 | $50,574 | $56,974 |
| AK | $69,610 | $57,801 | $56,826 |
| NJ | $79,200 | $61,692 | $56,659 |
| NH | $71,510 | $59,137 | $56,137 |
| IN | $63,960 | $51,715 | $56,099 |
| VA | $72,640 | $56,516 | $56,096 |
| NM | $61,880 | $50,158 | $55,493 |
| CA | $80,850 | $62,281 | $55,321 |
| WI | $64,020 | $51,274 | $55,076 |
| KS | $62,580 | $49,260 | $54,754 |
| TN | $60,230 | $50,575 | $54,667 |
| WY | $58,970 | $49,562 | $54,555 |
| NV | $62,450 | $52,359 | $53,989 |
| NC | $62,620 | $50,505 | $53,650 |
| DE | $67,540 | $53,118 | $53,518 |
| DC | $76,770 | $59,281 | $53,501 |
| OH | $59,390 | $48,983 | $53,351 |
| PA | $64,480 | $52,010 | $53,344 |
| IL | $66,900 | $52,727 | $53,338 |
| TX | $61,680 | $51,740 | $53,244 |
| MO | $60,440 | $48,840 | $53,225 |
| MT | $58,720 | $47,358 | $52,478 |
| UT | $62,580 | $49,678 | $52,292 |
| AL | $58,840 | $46,925 | $52,156 |
| ME | $63,900 | $50,530 | $52,041 |
| ID | $58,930 | $47,260 | $51,693 |
| NE | $57,770 | $46,673 | $51,643 |
| LA | $55,200 | $45,263 | $51,235 |
| SC | $58,510 | $47,629 | $51,117 |
| OK | $54,990 | $44,390 | $50,280 |
| FL | $60,660 | $50,920 | $49,221 |
| MD | $63,310 | $50,406 | $48,484 |
| OR | $67,040 | $50,677 | $48,392 |
| AR | $50,570 | $41,400 | $47,857 |
| KY | $52,750 | $42,836 | $47,349 |
| WV | $50,240 | $41,094 | $45,776 |
| MS | $48,440 | $39,256 | $44,971 |
| HI | $58,500 | $46,182 | $42,521 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of this job earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $69,990.
- 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 New York, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $69,287.
- Levelling out prices for this job is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Hawaii sits at the bottom on $42,521.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $69,990, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel 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 $69,287, in New York. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Hawaii at $42,521. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $42,521 — and the two source series are dated independently.