Occupation / job
Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
At $72,420 against a $50,020 midpoint, Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners pays $22,400 a year more than the typical American job — $10.76 an hour. Nothing pays that much more for free, and the thing it is paid for is what you should be reading about.
12,870 people work as Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners. That is enough for a functioning national market and not enough for a functioning local one — in most metros this is a few employers rather than a field you can move around inside.
This work suits people who can produce to length and to time, repeatedly, and who are not precious about being edited.
How long it takes to become one of the 12,870 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
A quarter of the field earns under $53,760 and a quarter over $100,780: $47,020 between them, a ratio of 1.9x. Wide enough that the first offer you get tells you more about your prospects than the median does.
Even the 25th percentile pays $53,760, $3,740 more than the $50,020 typical American job and $25.84 an hour. The floor, not the median, is the strongest financial argument for Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners.
Avoid it if you need a stable employer; this is one of the most restructured parts of the labour market.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 12,870 figure counts people already working as Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.9x, the distribution for Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $53,760 to $100,780 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.
The middle half of this field earns between $53,760 and $100,780. That is $47,020 of range, with $72,420 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $100,780, the 75th percentile, is worth $28,360 a year more than the $72,420 midpoint and $47,020 more than the $53,760 a quarter of Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners settle for.
The climb from $72,420 to $100,780 is $28,360, against $18,660 down to $53,760. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners is larger than the realistic downside.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $25.84 at the bottom quarter, $34.81 at the midpoint, $48.45 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $72,420 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners, the hourly figure is $72,420 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else