Training and Development Specialists
What the pay figures show
- Where are this job paid best? Delaware, at $88,570. That answer does not survive a pay stub. Take income tax out and New Hampshire is ahead. Then count what things cost locally, and Delaware wins — the money there behaves like $67,025. Three questions. Three different states.
- The nominal leader for training and development specialists is Delaware at $88,570, but the ordering does not hold through either adjustment. Applying federal, FICA and state income tax moves the top position to New Hampshire; deflating by regional price parity moves it again, to Delaware at $67,025 in national-average terms. ⚠️ Federal tax is not what does this — it is uniform across states and cannot change a ranking. State income tax reorders first, price level second, and the two act independently.
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
$69,280
People doing it
458,300
Highest paid
$88,570
DE
Best off, really
$67,025
DE, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$38,760
Highest tenth
$123,250
Lowest, really
$44,169
HI
States with data
51
National average
$75,550
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
99.25%
DE, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Nationally, this job pays within a fairly narrow band. Adjust for tax and for local prices and the band tightens again, to between $44,169 and $67,025. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- 458,300 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $69,280. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $69,280 in the middle.
- Wages for training and development specialists cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $44,169 to $67,025. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- National employment in training and development specialists is 458,300 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- 51 jurisdictions report training and development specialists, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Training and Development Specialists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $38,760 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $69,280 |
| Top tenth earn over | $123,250 |
| This salary | $69,280 |
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 Training and Development Specialists
The national median for this job
$69,280around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $38,760 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $69,280 |
| Top tenth | $123,250 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Training and Development Specialists, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $52,290 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Delaware · $88,570 |
| Spread | $36,280 |
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 | $62,860 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $64,687 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DE | $88,570 | $66,524 | $67,025 |
| NH | $86,050 | $69,366 | $65,847 |
| AK | $81,860 | $66,419 | $65,299 |
| WY | $69,380 | $57,639 | $63,445 |
| VT | $77,800 | $60,538 | $62,646 |
| WA | $81,860 | $66,419 | $61,180 |
| IA | $66,110 | $53,399 | $60,156 |
| MN | $76,710 | $59,103 | $60,053 |
| WI | $70,770 | $55,870 | $60,013 |
| ND | $63,260 | $53,009 | $59,849 |
| VA | $77,690 | $59,778 | $59,334 |
| RI | $75,910 | $59,806 | $58,973 |
| CO | $75,790 | $59,522 | $58,711 |
| SD | $61,570 | $51,651 | $58,632 |
| NE | $65,700 | $52,684 | $58,294 |
| PA | $71,350 | $56,834 | $58,292 |
| WV | $64,960 | $52,289 | $58,247 |
| CT | $78,080 | $60,215 | $58,073 |
| OH | $64,780 | $53,166 | $57,907 |
| FL | $71,990 | $59,475 | $57,490 |
| MD | $76,370 | $59,292 | $57,031 |
| AL | $64,490 | $51,216 | $56,926 |
| MA | $80,270 | $61,606 | $56,918 |
| TN | $62,280 | $52,222 | $56,447 |
| NM | $62,900 | $50,930 | $56,347 |
| MT | $62,880 | $50,505 | $55,965 |
| DC | $80,980 | $61,885 | $55,851 |
| NC | $65,250 | $52,514 | $55,783 |
| OK | $61,040 | $48,979 | $55,478 |
| NJ | $77,020 | $60,297 | $55,378 |
| GA | $67,320 | $53,429 | $55,253 |
| SC | $63,070 | $50,991 | $54,724 |
| KY | $61,390 | $49,476 | $54,689 |
| NY | $76,080 | $58,841 | $54,672 |
| MI | $64,350 | $51,401 | $54,575 |
| KS | $62,010 | $48,833 | $54,280 |
| TX | $62,860 | $52,688 | $54,220 |
| AZ | $67,140 | $54,787 | $54,188 |
| ID | $61,720 | $49,354 | $53,983 |
| OR | $76,360 | $56,418 | $53,875 |
| LA | $58,070 | $47,483 | $53,748 |
| IL | $67,380 | $53,041 | $53,656 |
| IN | $61,050 | $49,462 | $53,656 |
| ME | $65,680 | $51,841 | $53,390 |
| NV | $61,350 | $51,475 | $53,078 |
| CA | $75,790 | $59,157 | $52,547 |
| MO | $58,670 | $47,501 | $51,766 |
| UT | $60,900 | $48,403 | $50,950 |
| MS | $53,680 | $43,257 | $49,554 |
| AR | $52,290 | $42,719 | $49,381 |
| HI | $60,960 | $47,972 | $44,169 |
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 $69,280 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 New Hampshire, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $69,366.
- 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 — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $44,169. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for training and development specialists are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $69,280. 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 training and development specialists 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 $69,366, in New Hampshire. 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 training and development specialists 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.