Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products
What the pay figures show
- Colorado pays this job the most on paper: $135,000. Two things happen before that money is yours. State tax takes a share, which puts Washington in front. Then local prices decide what is left, and Louisiana wins at $105,062. The best offer and the best deal are not the same place.
- For sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products, Colorado's $135,000 median leads nominally and survives neither adjustment. State income tax differentials alone are sufficient to promote Washington; regional price parity then promotes Louisiana, whose $105,062 real figure is the highest purchasing power available in this occupation. Nominal wage comparisons across states are therefore a poor guide to relocation, and the error compounds rather than cancels.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$104,920
People doing it
284,800
Highest paid
$135,000
CO
Best off, really
$105,062
LA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$52,600
Highest tenth
$200,440
Lowest, really
$61,993
AK
States with data
49
National average
$119,730
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.34%
LA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Nationally, this job pays within a fairly narrow band. Adjust for tax and for local prices and the band tightens again, to between $61,993 and $105,062. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- About 284,800 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $104,920. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 49 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $104,920. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Colorado pays most.
- Wages for sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $61,993 to $105,062. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- With 284,800 workers, sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products in 49 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: Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $52,600 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $104,920 |
| Top tenth earn over | $200,440 |
| This salary | $104,920 |
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, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products
The national median for this job
$104,920around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $52,600 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $104,920 |
| Top tenth | $200,440 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $71,830 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Colorado · $135,000 |
| Spread | $63,170 |
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 | $99,080 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $101,960 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| LA | $124,200 | $92,817 | $105,062 |
| KS | $130,850 | $93,689 | $104,139 |
| NC | $125,370 | $92,463 | $98,219 |
| MI | $125,650 | $92,058 | $97,743 |
| CO | $135,000 | $98,307 | $96,967 |
| GA | $128,850 | $93,504 | $96,696 |
| VA | $128,270 | $92,324 | $91,637 |
| ND | $102,720 | $80,350 | $90,717 |
| WA | $127,390 | $98,337 | $90,581 |
| OH | $108,370 | $82,804 | $90,189 |
| SC | $111,190 | $82,225 | $88,246 |
| IA | $103,380 | $78,241 | $88,142 |
| WY | $100,850 | $79,778 | $87,815 |
| NJ | $131,360 | $94,873 | $87,133 |
| NY | $129,410 | $92,875 | $86,295 |
| RI | $117,670 | $87,374 | $86,157 |
| IN | $102,910 | $78,221 | $84,853 |
| ID | $101,390 | $75,637 | $82,732 |
| HI | $126,110 | $89,321 | $82,241 |
| WV | $97,230 | $73,667 | $82,060 |
| KY | $97,640 | $74,220 | $82,040 |
| FL | $107,700 | $84,597 | $81,774 |
| TN | $94,450 | $75,276 | $81,366 |
| TX | $99,080 | $78,533 | $80,816 |
| PA | $103,790 | $78,660 | $80,677 |
| NV | $98,500 | $78,125 | $80,558 |
| MA | $118,980 | $86,903 | $80,289 |
| IL | $107,570 | $79,326 | $80,244 |
| DE | $107,830 | $78,803 | $79,396 |
| CA | $124,220 | $88,710 | $78,797 |
| MO | $94,840 | $72,030 | $78,496 |
| ME | $101,850 | $74,841 | $77,079 |
| MN | $103,000 | $75,810 | $77,029 |
| AZ | $100,620 | $77,503 | $76,656 |
| OR | $113,830 | $79,499 | $75,915 |
| VT | $95,900 | $72,077 | $74,586 |
| NM | $87,310 | $67,305 | $74,464 |
| AL | $87,140 | $66,458 | $73,867 |
| NH | $97,960 | $77,745 | $73,800 |
| NE | $84,400 | $65,069 | $71,998 |
| MT | $83,610 | $64,287 | $71,236 |
| CT | $98,000 | $73,133 | $70,531 |
| MD | $95,040 | $71,540 | $68,811 |
| MS | $74,990 | $58,678 | $67,220 |
| AR | $71,830 | $57,163 | $66,079 |
| WI | $78,480 | $60,836 | $65,347 |
| OK | $72,480 | $57,059 | $64,629 |
| DC | $92,940 | $69,282 | $62,527 |
| AK | $77,080 | $63,056 | $61,993 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $104,920, 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $98,337.
- 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 — Alaska anchors the bottom at $61,993. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products, with a national value of $104,920. 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 sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products 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 $98,337, in Washington. 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 sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products 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.