Tax Preparers
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for tax preparers is New York, at $71,850. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Montana comes out ahead, worth $56,133. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for tax preparers: New York leads at $71,850 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Montana to $56,133 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.
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
$54,920
People doing it
76,480
Highest paid
$71,850
NY
Best off, really
$56,133
MT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$33,760
Highest tenth
$99,270
Lowest, really
$26,507
HI
States with data
48
National average
$60,930
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.24%
MT, 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 $26,507 to $56,133.
- Just 76,480 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 48 jurisdictions, averaging $54,920 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. New York leads the published set.
- Geographic dispersion in tax preparers 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 $26,507 to $56,133 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 76,480 are employed nationally in tax preparers — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- Coverage for tax preparers runs to 48 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: Tax Preparers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $33,760 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $54,920 |
| Top tenth earn over | $99,270 |
| This salary | $54,920 |
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 Tax Preparers
The national median for this job
$54,920around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $33,760 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $54,920 |
| Top tenth | $99,270 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Tax Preparers, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alabama · $33,280 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New York · $71,850 |
| Spread | $38,570 |
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 | $47,460 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $48,840 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MT | $63,080 | $50,657 | $56,133 |
| UT | $66,720 | $52,798 | $55,576 |
| MO | $62,780 | $50,610 | $55,154 |
| ND | $57,060 | $48,028 | $54,224 |
| WY | $57,990 | $48,775 | $53,689 |
| NY | $71,850 | $56,094 | $52,119 |
| NV | $60,000 | $50,390 | $51,959 |
| AK | $62,360 | $52,286 | $51,405 |
| PA | $61,270 | $49,529 | $50,799 |
| SD | $52,530 | $44,388 | $50,386 |
| CO | $62,620 | $50,448 | $49,761 |
| IA | $53,660 | $43,869 | $49,420 |
| CA | $70,030 | $55,566 | $49,357 |
| NH | $61,370 | $51,491 | $48,878 |
| MN | $59,200 | $47,245 | $48,005 |
| MS | $50,670 | $40,959 | $46,921 |
| VA | $58,520 | $46,597 | $46,250 |
| RI | $57,680 | $46,783 | $46,132 |
| OH | $49,020 | $40,936 | $44,587 |
| OR | $61,370 | $46,671 | $44,567 |
| IL | $54,480 | $43,403 | $43,905 |
| MA | $58,400 | $46,504 | $42,965 |
| KS | $47,300 | $37,835 | $42,055 |
| DE | $51,960 | $41,613 | $41,926 |
| NC | $48,130 | $39,441 | $41,896 |
| TX | $47,460 | $40,314 | $41,486 |
| GA | $49,330 | $39,954 | $41,318 |
| IN | $45,710 | $37,589 | $40,776 |
| FL | $49,020 | $41,568 | $40,181 |
| MI | $46,400 | $37,741 | $40,072 |
| OK | $42,700 | $35,068 | $39,721 |
| ME | $47,150 | $38,202 | $39,345 |
| NE | $43,010 | $35,485 | $39,264 |
| WI | $44,340 | $36,475 | $39,179 |
| AZ | $44,770 | $37,436 | $37,027 |
| LA | $38,740 | $32,532 | $36,823 |
| MD | $47,020 | $38,091 | $36,638 |
| SC | $39,220 | $33,211 | $35,643 |
| WA | $45,370 | $38,635 | $35,588 |
| NM | $38,060 | $32,092 | $35,505 |
| TN | $36,600 | $31,588 | $34,144 |
| AR | $35,040 | $29,497 | $34,097 |
| KY | $36,620 | $30,440 | $33,647 |
| WV | $35,880 | $30,096 | $33,525 |
| NJ | $43,420 | $36,217 | $33,262 |
| CT | $41,130 | $33,762 | $32,561 |
| AL | $33,280 | $27,518 | $30,586 |
| HI | $34,720 | $28,789 | $26,507 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for tax preparers as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $54,920, 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 tax preparers 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 New York, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $56,094.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for tax preparers. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Hawaii, on $26,507.
- These are distribution medians for tax preparers, with a national value of $54,920. 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 tax preparers 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 $56,094, in New York. 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 results for tax preparers rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Hawaii anchors the distribution at $26,507. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.