Switchboard Operators, Including Answering Service
What the pay figures show
- Hawaii pays this job the most, at $59,860. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $43,432 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Hawaii leads for switchboard operators, including answering service at $59,860 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $43,432 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
$38,630
People doing it
34,280
Highest paid
$59,860
HI
Best off, really
$43,432
HI, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$29,990
Highest tenth
$59,470
Lowest, really
$29,297
MS
States with data
46
National average
$42,300
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.61%
HI, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $29,297 to $43,432.
- This is a small job: about 34,280 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 46 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $38,630. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Hawaii pays most.
- Interstate variation in switchboard operators, including answering service pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $29,297 to $43,432, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 34,280 workers, switchboard operators, including answering service is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for switchboard operators, including answering service in 46 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: Switchboard Operators, Including Answering Service
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $29,990 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $38,630 |
| Top tenth earn over | $59,470 |
| This salary | $38,630 |
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 Switchboard Operators, Including Answering Service
The national median for this job
$38,630around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $29,990 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $38,630 |
| Top tenth | $59,470 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Switchboard Operators, Including Answering Service, state by state
The national median for this job
46states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $30,520 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $59,860 |
| Spread | $29,340 |
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 | $33,620 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $34,597 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| HI | $59,860 | $47,171 | $43,432 |
| DC | $54,700 | $44,015 | $39,724 |
| MN | $47,430 | $38,571 | $39,191 |
| WA | $47,800 | $40,587 | $37,386 |
| VT | $42,630 | $35,261 | $36,489 |
| ME | $43,350 | $35,406 | $36,464 |
| IA | $38,400 | $32,187 | $36,260 |
| CA | $48,840 | $40,300 | $35,796 |
| NH | $44,210 | $37,703 | $35,790 |
| WI | $40,030 | $33,224 | $35,688 |
| CO | $43,720 | $36,094 | $35,602 |
| NM | $37,710 | $31,826 | $35,211 |
| KS | $38,760 | $31,449 | $34,957 |
| IL | $42,660 | $34,490 | $34,890 |
| WV | $37,430 | $31,293 | $34,858 |
| NE | $37,570 | $31,362 | $34,701 |
| ID | $38,000 | $31,552 | $34,512 |
| KY | $37,590 | $31,186 | $34,471 |
| LA | $35,890 | $30,327 | $34,328 |
| AR | $35,290 | $29,688 | $34,319 |
| NY | $45,330 | $36,752 | $34,148 |
| NC | $38,520 | $32,103 | $34,101 |
| MO | $37,130 | $31,206 | $34,008 |
| OH | $36,350 | $31,104 | $33,878 |
| NV | $38,070 | $32,769 | $33,790 |
| MT | $36,270 | $30,375 | $33,659 |
| GA | $39,490 | $32,538 | $33,649 |
| AZ | $40,380 | $34,018 | $33,647 |
| OK | $35,280 | $29,440 | $33,347 |
| IN | $36,860 | $30,739 | $33,345 |
| TN | $35,550 | $30,744 | $33,232 |
| MA | $43,790 | $35,496 | $32,794 |
| MI | $37,390 | $30,885 | $32,792 |
| RI | $39,850 | $33,125 | $32,664 |
| AK | $37,690 | $32,464 | $31,917 |
| PA | $36,890 | $30,689 | $31,475 |
| SC | $34,010 | $29,129 | $31,262 |
| NJ | $40,430 | $33,968 | $31,197 |
| CT | $38,380 | $31,811 | $30,679 |
| VA | $36,730 | $30,341 | $30,116 |
| TX | $33,620 | $29,194 | $30,042 |
| DE | $35,980 | $29,660 | $29,883 |
| AL | $32,210 | $26,708 | $29,686 |
| FL | $35,410 | $30,632 | $29,610 |
| MD | $37,080 | $30,576 | $29,410 |
| MS | $30,520 | $25,574 | $29,297 |
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 $38,630.
- 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 Hawaii, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $47,171.
- 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 — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $29,297. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for switchboard operators, including answering service, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $38,630, 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 switchboard operators, including answering service 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 $47,171, in Hawaii. 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 switchboard operators, including answering service 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.