Substance Abuse, Behavioral Disorder, and Mental Health Counselors
What the pay figures show
- Alaska pays this job the most, $80,770. It still pays the most after tax. What it does not do is stay ahead once you count what living there costs. Level that out and New Mexico wins, at $64,880. Same work. A wage that goes further.
- For substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors, Alaska leads both nominally at $80,770 and after tax — state income tax differentials are not large enough here to disturb the ordering. Regional price parity is: deflating take-home by each state's price level puts New Mexico first at $64,880. The adjustment that matters for this occupation is therefore cost of living rather than tax, which is the opposite of the assumption most relocation comparisons start from.
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
$59,350
People doing it
491,930
Highest paid
$80,770
AK
Best off, really
$64,880
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$38,940
Highest tenth
$97,590
Lowest, really
$36,097
LA
States with data
51
National average
$64,440
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, 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 $36,097 to $64,880.
- Roughly 491,930 people hold this job nationally, earning $59,350 in the middle. A solid, ordinary-sized job.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $59,350, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Geographic dispersion in substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors 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 $36,097 to $64,880 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 491,930 are employed nationally in substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors, placing it well inside the reported range without approaching the highest-headcount occupations.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Substance Abuse, Behavioral Disorder, and Mental Health Counselors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $38,940 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $59,350 |
| Top tenth earn over | $97,590 |
| This salary | $59,350 |
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 Substance Abuse, Behavioral Disorder, and Mental Health Counselors
The national median for this job
$59,350around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $38,940 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $59,350 |
| Top tenth | $97,590 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Substance Abuse, Behavioral Disorder, and Mental Health Counselors, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Louisiana · $37,910 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Alaska · $80,770 |
| Spread | $42,860 |
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 | $62,630 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $64,451 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NM | $74,100 | $58,642 | $64,880 |
| AK | $80,770 | $65,652 | $64,545 |
| ND | $68,630 | $57,032 | $64,391 |
| WY | $62,980 | $52,784 | $58,102 |
| NE | $63,770 | $51,221 | $56,676 |
| IA | $60,880 | $49,395 | $55,646 |
| ID | $63,360 | $50,585 | $55,329 |
| TX | $62,630 | $52,503 | $54,030 |
| OK | $59,350 | $47,697 | $54,026 |
| WI | $62,220 | $49,935 | $53,637 |
| UT | $63,890 | $50,673 | $53,338 |
| AZ | $65,300 | $53,419 | $52,835 |
| OR | $74,590 | $55,328 | $52,833 |
| WA | $68,910 | $57,308 | $52,788 |
| MT | $59,000 | $47,570 | $52,713 |
| OH | $58,360 | $48,184 | $52,481 |
| MI | $61,690 | $49,377 | $52,426 |
| KS | $59,470 | $46,934 | $52,169 |
| RI | $65,120 | $52,482 | $51,751 |
| VT | $61,810 | $49,875 | $51,612 |
| SD | $53,650 | $45,288 | $51,408 |
| MO | $56,910 | $46,170 | $50,315 |
| NV | $57,210 | $48,148 | $49,648 |
| CO | $62,390 | $50,274 | $49,588 |
| ME | $59,970 | $47,638 | $49,062 |
| GA | $58,960 | $47,211 | $48,823 |
| AR | $51,580 | $42,175 | $48,752 |
| CT | $63,590 | $50,527 | $48,729 |
| IL | $60,730 | $48,115 | $48,673 |
| KY | $54,190 | $43,943 | $48,573 |
| NC | $55,490 | $45,061 | $47,866 |
| MN | $58,780 | $46,936 | $47,691 |
| IN | $53,760 | $43,820 | $47,535 |
| VA | $59,880 | $47,611 | $47,257 |
| NJ | $62,820 | $50,733 | $46,594 |
| SC | $52,370 | $43,103 | $46,259 |
| FL | $56,790 | $47,811 | $46,215 |
| MD | $59,530 | $47,548 | $45,735 |
| TN | $49,580 | $42,018 | $45,417 |
| WV | $49,430 | $40,477 | $45,089 |
| DE | $56,020 | $44,650 | $44,986 |
| MA | $59,890 | $47,627 | $44,002 |
| NY | $59,450 | $47,335 | $43,981 |
| NH | $54,840 | $46,244 | $43,898 |
| MS | $46,990 | $38,149 | $43,703 |
| HI | $60,090 | $47,339 | $43,586 |
| DC | $60,450 | $48,269 | $43,562 |
| PA | $52,010 | $42,373 | $43,460 |
| CA | $59,250 | $48,040 | $42,671 |
| AL | $47,310 | $38,168 | $42,423 |
| LA | $37,910 | $31,890 | $36,097 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $59,350 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- 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 Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $65,652.
- 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 — Louisiana anchors the bottom at $36,097. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $59,350. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors 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 $65,652, in Alaska. 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 substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors 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.