Occupation / job
Office Clerks, General
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
Office Clerks, General pays $45,010 where the typical job pays $50,020 — $2.40 an hour apart. That is close enough to average that the interesting numbers on this page are the percentiles, not the median.
2,464,940 people are employed as Office Clerks, General, which puts it among the largest occupations in the United States. At this scale you are never short of a vacancy and never scarce, and the second fact is why the first one is cheap.
These roles suit people who want dependable indoor work with a clear task, and who would rather be accurate than visible.
We carry no verified training length for Office Clerks, General — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
A quarter of Office Clerks, General earn under $36,350 and a quarter over $54,300 — 1.5x, or $17,950 apart. Narrow spreads usually mean a pay schedule, which is stability bought at the price of upside.
A quarter of the field earns under $36,350 — $13,670 below the $50,020 the typical American job pays. That is the number to plan on for a first year, not the midpoint.
Avoid it if you need a role with a defined next step; these posts often do not have one.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 2,464,940 figure counts people already working as Office Clerks, General, 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
$36,350 to $54,300 is a 1.5x range. Ranges this tight usually mean the employer set is homogeneous — the same kind of organisation paying the same kind of scale — so the lever you have is geography rather than employer.
Put in money rather than ratios: $36,350 at the 25th percentile, $45,010 at the midpoint, $54,300 at the 75th. $17,950 separates the quarter of Office Clerks, General at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $54,300. Reaching it from the $45,010 midpoint is $9,290 a year; reaching it from the $36,350 that the bottom quarter of Office Clerks, General earn is $17,950.
$8,660 down to $36,350, $9,290 up to $54,300: the midpoint of Office Clerks, General is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $17.47 at the bottom quarter, $21.63 at the midpoint, $26.10 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Office Clerks, General. The self-employed are excluded, so $45,010 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $45,010 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