Tour and Travel Guides
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for tour and travel guides. Best paid: Washington, at $54,160. Tax does not change that. Best off: Wyoming, at $43,986 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- Washington's $54,160 median for tour and travel guides survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: Wyoming takes the top position at $43,986. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
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
$38,120
People doing it
53,500
Highest paid
$54,160
WA
Best off, really
$43,986
WY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$28,520
Highest tenth
$60,930
Lowest, really
$22,404
IA
States with data
50
National average
$43,720
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.85%
WY, 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 $22,404 to $43,986.
- This is a small job: about 53,500 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $38,120. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Washington pays most.
- Interstate variation in tour and travel guides 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 $22,404 to $43,986, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 53,500 workers, tour and travel guides 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 tour and travel guides in 50 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: Tour and Travel Guides
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $28,520 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $38,120 |
| Top tenth earn over | $60,930 |
| This salary | $38,120 |
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 Tour and Travel Guides
The national median for this job
$38,120around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $28,520 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $38,120 |
| Top tenth | $60,930 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Tour and Travel Guides, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Iowa · $22,490 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $54,160 |
| Spread | $31,670 |
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 | $33,080 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $34,042 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| WY | $47,020 | $39,961 | $43,986 |
| WA | $54,160 | $45,698 | $42,094 |
| VT | $45,920 | $37,795 | $39,111 |
| KS | $43,700 | $35,143 | $39,063 |
| ME | $44,940 | $36,576 | $37,669 |
| AK | $44,210 | $37,703 | $37,067 |
| MT | $40,100 | $33,272 | $36,869 |
| DC | $49,210 | $39,934 | $36,040 |
| CO | $42,840 | $35,425 | $34,942 |
| NV | $39,360 | $33,806 | $34,858 |
| NM | $37,080 | $31,347 | $34,681 |
| ND | $35,360 | $30,592 | $34,539 |
| SD | $35,100 | $30,383 | $34,489 |
| ID | $37,960 | $31,522 | $34,479 |
| FL | $41,600 | $35,606 | $34,418 |
| GA | $40,190 | $33,066 | $34,195 |
| HI | $45,940 | $37,019 | $34,084 |
| CA | $46,000 | $38,165 | $33,900 |
| NH | $41,600 | $35,606 | $33,799 |
| NY | $44,450 | $36,092 | $33,535 |
| AR | $34,290 | $28,922 | $33,433 |
| MN | $39,650 | $32,736 | $33,263 |
| KY | $36,070 | $30,017 | $33,180 |
| UT | $38,540 | $31,432 | $33,085 |
| SC | $35,190 | $30,053 | $32,254 |
| MD | $40,310 | $33,018 | $31,759 |
| TN | $33,760 | $29,306 | $31,677 |
| RI | $38,310 | $31,945 | $31,501 |
| AZ | $37,560 | $31,823 | $31,475 |
| LA | $32,060 | $27,365 | $30,975 |
| MI | $35,090 | $29,134 | $30,933 |
| OH | $32,800 | $28,349 | $30,877 |
| OK | $32,150 | $27,066 | $30,657 |
| IL | $36,780 | $30,057 | $30,405 |
| MO | $31,980 | $27,310 | $29,762 |
| NE | $31,580 | $26,800 | $29,654 |
| TX | $33,080 | $28,760 | $29,596 |
| OR | $39,260 | $30,840 | $29,450 |
| NC | $32,570 | $27,559 | $29,275 |
| AL | $31,700 | $26,322 | $29,257 |
| MA | $37,840 | $31,012 | $28,652 |
| NJ | $36,640 | $31,055 | $28,522 |
| IN | $31,030 | $26,227 | $28,450 |
| CT | $35,090 | $29,451 | $28,403 |
| PA | $32,910 | $27,613 | $28,321 |
| DE | $33,210 | $27,588 | $27,796 |
| WI | $30,160 | $25,780 | $27,691 |
| WV | $28,570 | $24,454 | $27,240 |
| MS | $27,460 | $23,217 | $26,597 |
| IA | $22,490 | $19,888 | $22,404 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for tour and travel guides, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $38,120 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for tour and travel guides, 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 Washington, at $45,698.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for tour and travel guides. 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 Iowa, on $22,404.
- All wage figures for tour and travel guides are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $38,120. 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.
- Retained-pay figures for tour and travel guides 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 $45,698, which leads in Washington.
- Real-terms results for tour and travel guides 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; Iowa anchors the distribution at $22,404. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.