Occupation / job
Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks
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
Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks pays $58,260 against $50,020 across all occupations — $686 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.
National employment is 153,140. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.
These roles suit people who want steady, structured work with money, and who find genuine satisfaction in a set of books that balance.
We carry no verified training length for Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
Between $47,990 and $69,600 there is $21,610, a ratio of 1.5x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
The bottom quarter of Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks earns under $47,990, which is within $2,030 of the $50,020 typical American job. An occupation whose 25th percentile is level with the national middle has an unusually forgiving downside.
Avoid it if you want a role software is not steadily absorbing; this one is.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 153,140 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
$47,990 to $69,600 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: $47,990 at the 25th percentile, $58,260 at the midpoint, $69,600 at the 75th. $21,610 separates the quarter of Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $69,600. Reaching it from the $58,260 midpoint is $11,340 a year; reaching it from the $47,990 that the bottom quarter of Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks earn is $21,610.
$58,260 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $10,270 above the bottom quarter, $11,340 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $23.07 at the bottom quarter, $28.00 at the midpoint, $33.46 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
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $58,260 describes them.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $58,260 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