Tutors
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. Wyoming pays tutors best, at $82,290. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $73,442 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for tutors is also the real leader: Wyoming at $82,290, holding through tax and through price deflation to $73,442. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
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
$43,350
People doing it
175,070
Highest paid
$82,290
WY
Best off, really
$73,442
WY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$29,430
Highest tenth
$75,990
Lowest, really
$27,452
NV
States with data
50
National average
$48,050
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.85%
WY, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $27,452 up to $73,442.
- 175,070 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $43,350. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $43,350. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Wyoming pays most.
- The nominal spread for tutors approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $27,452 to $73,442, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in tutors is 175,070 — 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.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for tutors 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: Tutors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $29,430 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $43,350 |
| Top tenth earn over | $75,990 |
| This salary | $43,350 |
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 Tutors
The national median for this job
$43,350around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $29,430 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $43,350 |
| Top tenth | $75,990 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Tutors, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Nevada · $30,420 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Wyoming · $82,290 |
| Spread | $51,870 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| WY | $82,290 | $66,721 | $73,442 |
| RI | $77,850 | $61,098 | $60,247 |
| TN | $50,280 | $42,580 | $46,025 |
| MS | $49,610 | $40,149 | $45,994 |
| VT | $53,920 | $43,955 | $45,485 |
| MA | $60,900 | $48,388 | $44,705 |
| ND | $46,190 | $39,294 | $44,364 |
| NH | $53,790 | $45,400 | $43,097 |
| ME | $49,880 | $40,212 | $41,414 |
| MD | $52,810 | $42,468 | $40,848 |
| WV | $44,070 | $36,396 | $40,543 |
| OH | $43,610 | $36,738 | $40,014 |
| GA | $47,380 | $38,484 | $39,798 |
| CT | $50,350 | $40,617 | $39,172 |
| AK | $45,990 | $39,133 | $38,473 |
| CO | $47,420 | $38,904 | $38,374 |
| MT | $41,380 | $34,241 | $37,942 |
| SD | $38,760 | $33,324 | $37,827 |
| NC | $42,390 | $35,058 | $37,240 |
| MN | $44,800 | $36,599 | $37,187 |
| WI | $41,340 | $34,212 | $36,749 |
| OR | $48,280 | $37,299 | $35,617 |
| WA | $45,360 | $38,627 | $35,580 |
| NE | $38,470 | $32,044 | $35,456 |
| NY | $47,100 | $38,078 | $35,380 |
| IA | $36,790 | $30,955 | $34,872 |
| IN | $38,090 | $31,691 | $34,378 |
| NM | $36,660 | $31,027 | $34,327 |
| CA | $45,100 | $37,478 | $33,290 |
| VA | $40,750 | $33,340 | $33,092 |
| MI | $37,380 | $30,877 | $32,784 |
| OK | $34,510 | $28,856 | $32,685 |
| AZ | $38,940 | $32,897 | $32,538 |
| LA | $33,780 | $28,695 | $32,481 |
| NJ | $42,270 | $35,356 | $32,472 |
| AL | $35,500 | $29,198 | $32,453 |
| ID | $34,990 | $29,293 | $32,041 |
| KY | $34,240 | $28,611 | $31,626 |
| KS | $34,170 | $28,017 | $31,143 |
| FL | $37,310 | $32,159 | $31,086 |
| PA | $36,270 | $30,209 | $30,984 |
| IL | $37,400 | $30,524 | $30,878 |
| SC | $33,220 | $28,510 | $30,597 |
| UT | $35,190 | $28,889 | $30,409 |
| AR | $30,830 | $26,270 | $30,367 |
| TX | $33,620 | $29,194 | $30,042 |
| MO | $32,270 | $27,530 | $30,001 |
| DE | $33,240 | $27,610 | $27,818 |
| HI | $36,590 | $30,164 | $27,773 |
| NV | $30,420 | $26,622 | $27,452 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for tutors, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $43,350 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for tutors 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 Wyoming, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $66,721.
- Levelling out prices for tutors is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Nevada sits at the bottom on $27,452.
- All wage figures for tutors are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $43,350. 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 tutors 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 $66,721, in Wyoming. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to tutors uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Nevada at $27,452. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Nevada anchors the bottom at $27,452 — and the two source series are dated independently.