Occupation / job
Designers, All Other
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
Designers, All Other pays $64,950 against $50,020 across all occupations — $1,244 a month more. Every premium is paid for something: find out whether it is the schooling, the licence, the hours or the risk before you decide you want it.
9,480 people work as Designers, All Other. 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.
Art and design work suits people who can take a brief from someone with worse taste than theirs and produce something good anyway, then do it again after the revisions.
No verified preparation time is on file for Designers, All Other. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
A quarter of the field earns under $51,020 and a quarter over $95,860: $44,840 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 $51,020, $1,000 more than the $50,020 typical American job and $24.52 an hour. The floor, not the median, is the strongest financial argument for Designers, All Other.
Avoid it if revision by committee would demoralise you — the final version is rarely the one you would have chosen.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 9,480 people employed as Designers, All Other; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
A ratio of 1.9x — $51,020 to $95,860 — is wide enough that specialising inside Designers, All Other pays measurably. $64,950 is the middle of a range you can move within.
The middle half of this field earns between $51,020 and $95,860. That is $44,840 of range, with $64,950 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $51,020 and $95,860 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $64,950. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $30,910; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $44,840.
The upper half of the middle range — $64,950 to $95,860, or $30,910 — is far longer than the lower half at $13,930. In a shape like this an average would flatter Designers, All Other considerably, and would describe nobody.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Designers, All Other is $31.22 an hour. The quarters sit at $24.52 and $46.08, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $64,950 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.
The hourly number on this page is $64,950 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Designers, All Other, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else