Occupation / job
Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
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
Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors pays $64,330 against $50,020 across all occupations — $1,192 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.
This is a large occupation: 353,310 people work as Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors. Large occupations hire continuously and replace continuously, and the pay reflects both facts.
Counselling and social work suit people who can hold a caseload of problems they cannot fix and still come back on Monday. Emotional stamina is the binding constraint, not credentials.
No verified preparation time is on file for Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors. 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
$51,270 to $82,870 — 1.6x, or $2,633 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
The 25th percentile is $51,270, $1,250 above the $50,020 typical American job. A floor above the national midpoint is rare, and it is worth more than an equivalent amount of upside.
Avoid it if you need to fix things. Most of this caseload cannot be fixed by anyone at your desk.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 353,310 figure counts people already working as Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors, 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
1.6x between $51,270 and $82,870 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $64,330 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
In cash terms the middle half of Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors runs $51,270 to $82,870 — $31,600 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $64,330.
Between $51,270 and $82,870 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $64,330. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $18,540; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $31,600.
The climb from $64,330 to $82,870 is $18,540, against $13,060 down to $51,270. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors is larger than the realistic downside.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors is $30.92 an hour. The quarters sit at $24.64 and $39.84, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $64,330 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.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $64,330 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else