Statisticians
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for statisticians is the District of Columbia, at $140,670. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Kentucky comes out ahead, worth $93,035. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for statisticians: the District of Columbia leads at $140,670 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Kentucky to $93,035 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$105,650
People doing it
29,030
Highest paid
$140,670
DC
Best off, really
$93,035
KY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$64,000
Highest tenth
$174,050
Lowest, really
$53,819
HI
States with data
45
National average
$115,700
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.47%
KY, 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 $53,819 up to $93,035.
- Just 29,030 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 45 jurisdictions, averaging $105,650 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. The District of Columbia leads the published set.
- The nominal spread for statisticians approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $53,819 to $93,035, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- 29,030 are employed nationally in statisticians — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- Coverage for statisticians runs to 45 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Statisticians
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $64,000 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $105,650 |
| Top tenth earn over | $174,050 |
| This salary | $105,650 |
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 Statisticians
The national median for this job
$105,650around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $64,000 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $105,650 |
| Top tenth | $174,050 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Statisticians, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $64,670 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $140,670 |
| Spread | $76,000 |
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 | $102,960 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $105,953 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| KY | $112,520 | $84,167 | $93,035 |
| AR | $105,720 | $79,751 | $92,189 |
| MD | $132,620 | $95,782 | $92,129 |
| NC | $115,690 | $86,111 | $91,472 |
| KS | $111,780 | $81,518 | $90,611 |
| NY | $136,020 | $96,928 | $90,060 |
| IN | $109,300 | $82,528 | $89,525 |
| DC | $140,670 | $98,425 | $88,828 |
| IL | $119,760 | $87,298 | $88,309 |
| GA | $115,150 | $84,691 | $87,582 |
| WI | $107,150 | $79,304 | $85,184 |
| CA | $135,960 | $95,642 | $84,954 |
| TN | $98,230 | $77,935 | $84,240 |
| TX | $102,960 | $81,262 | $83,625 |
| VA | $114,920 | $83,829 | $83,206 |
| OH | $98,190 | $75,923 | $82,694 |
| FL | $108,040 | $84,836 | $82,005 |
| MI | $102,710 | $76,972 | $81,725 |
| CO | $109,660 | $81,859 | $80,743 |
| DE | $109,570 | $79,912 | $80,513 |
| NJ | $118,280 | $86,695 | $79,623 |
| OK | $89,540 | $68,293 | $77,354 |
| WA | $105,650 | $83,155 | $76,597 |
| RI | $102,620 | $77,501 | $76,422 |
| PA | $93,830 | $71,959 | $73,804 |
| CT | $102,860 | $76,270 | $73,557 |
| WV | $84,660 | $65,400 | $72,851 |
| NH | $96,080 | $76,422 | $72,545 |
| NM | $84,330 | $65,355 | $72,306 |
| NE | $83,480 | $64,463 | $71,328 |
| UT | $88,610 | $67,224 | $70,761 |
| IA | $80,150 | $62,782 | $70,726 |
| ND | $75,890 | $61,998 | $69,997 |
| LA | $76,400 | $60,672 | $68,676 |
| NV | $79,750 | $64,934 | $66,956 |
| MA | $96,710 | $72,350 | $66,843 |
| ME | $85,680 | $64,622 | $66,554 |
| AL | $76,400 | $59,321 | $65,935 |
| VT | $82,210 | $63,349 | $65,555 |
| OR | $93,620 | $67,050 | $64,027 |
| AZ | $79,640 | $63,268 | $62,577 |
| MS | $64,670 | $51,648 | $59,166 |
| MO | $66,330 | $53,296 | $58,081 |
| SC | $65,450 | $52,745 | $56,607 |
| HI | $76,780 | $58,453 | $53,819 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for statisticians as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $105,650, 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 statisticians 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 $98,425.
- Levelling out prices for statisticians 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 $53,819.
- These are distribution medians for statisticians, with a national value of $105,650. 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 statisticians 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 $98,425, 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.
- The price deflation applied to statisticians 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 $53,819. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $53,819 — and the two source series are dated independently.