Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents
What the pay figures show
- New York pays this job the most, at $168,340. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $108,586 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- New York leads for securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents at $168,340 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $108,586 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
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
$78,660
People doing it
489,570
Highest paid
$168,340
NY
Best off, really
$108,586
NY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$48,040
Highest tenth
$212,880
Lowest, really
$41,912
HI
States with data
48
National average
$109,150
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
107.63%
NY, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $41,912 to $108,586.
- 489,570 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $78,660. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $78,660 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. New York tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $41,912 to $108,586 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- National employment in securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents is 489,570 — 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.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $48,040 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $78,660 |
| Top tenth earn over | $212,880 |
| This salary | $78,660 |
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 Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents
The national median for this job
$78,660around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $48,040 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $78,660 |
| Top tenth | $212,880 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $46,680 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New York · $168,340 |
| Spread | $121,660 |
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 | $78,470 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $80,751 |
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 | $168,340 | $116,866 | $108,586 |
| SD | $86,780 | $69,880 | $79,323 |
| IL | $99,840 | $74,270 | $75,130 |
| CT | $98,560 | $73,496 | $70,881 |
| NE | $82,560 | $63,858 | $70,658 |
| VT | $88,280 | $67,219 | $69,560 |
| MA | $100,310 | $74,703 | $69,017 |
| OK | $76,080 | $59,429 | $67,314 |
| MO | $78,500 | $61,303 | $66,806 |
| TX | $78,470 | $64,034 | $65,895 |
| KS | $75,810 | $58,221 | $64,715 |
| OH | $73,300 | $59,097 | $64,368 |
| MN | $83,350 | $63,322 | $64,341 |
| DE | $83,750 | $63,452 | $63,929 |
| WI | $74,010 | $57,957 | $62,255 |
| NC | $74,040 | $58,472 | $62,112 |
| AK | $76,360 | $62,549 | $61,495 |
| MI | $73,480 | $57,651 | $61,211 |
| NH | $78,930 | $64,357 | $61,092 |
| ND | $63,670 | $53,339 | $60,221 |
| IN | $68,290 | $54,887 | $59,541 |
| AZ | $74,840 | $60,011 | $59,356 |
| PA | $71,840 | $57,164 | $58,630 |
| IA | $64,290 | $52,006 | $58,587 |
| NJ | $82,420 | $63,752 | $58,551 |
| WA | $75,510 | $61,951 | $57,065 |
| ID | $64,620 | $51,531 | $56,364 |
| CA | $79,730 | $61,597 | $54,714 |
| NM | $60,850 | $49,379 | $54,631 |
| OR | $76,710 | $56,634 | $54,080 |
| UT | $64,660 | $51,257 | $53,954 |
| NV | $61,490 | $51,587 | $53,194 |
| CO | $67,010 | $53,731 | $52,999 |
| TN | $58,050 | $48,823 | $52,773 |
| KY | $59,110 | $47,724 | $52,752 |
| AR | $54,660 | $44,535 | $51,481 |
| FL | $62,770 | $52,616 | $50,860 |
| DC | $72,010 | $56,255 | $50,770 |
| GA | $59,990 | $47,987 | $49,625 |
| VA | $62,910 | $49,871 | $49,501 |
| ME | $59,970 | $47,638 | $49,062 |
| SC | $55,390 | $45,329 | $48,649 |
| MD | $61,660 | $49,159 | $47,284 |
| WV | $50,050 | $40,949 | $45,614 |
| LA | $48,040 | $39,725 | $44,966 |
| AL | $49,230 | $39,626 | $44,044 |
| MS | $46,680 | $37,912 | $43,431 |
| HI | $57,590 | $45,520 | $41,912 |
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 $78,660.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for this job, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is New York, at $116,866.
- 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 $41,912.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $78,660, 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.
- Retained-pay figures for securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $116,866, which leads in New York.
- The price deflation applied to securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents 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 $41,912. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $41,912 — and the two source series are dated independently.