Occupation / job
Rehabilitation Counselors
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
Rehabilitation Counselors pays $46,850 where the typical job pays $50,020 — $1.52 an hour apart. That is close enough to average that the interesting numbers on this page are the percentiles, not the median.
94,740 people are employed as Rehabilitation Counselors. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.
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.
How long it takes to become one of the 94,740 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
$38,770 to $59,260 — 1.5x, or $1,707 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Rehabilitation Counselors is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
A quarter of the field earns under $38,770 — $11,250 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 to fix things. Most of this caseload cannot be fixed by anyone at your desk.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 94,740 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
At 1.5x between $38,770 and $59,260 this is a normally shaped occupation. $46,850 is what the middle of Rehabilitation Counselors earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
The middle half of this field earns between $38,770 and $59,260. That is $20,490 of range, with $46,850 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $59,260. Reaching it from the $46,850 midpoint is $12,410 a year; reaching it from the $38,770 that the bottom quarter of Rehabilitation Counselors earn is $20,490.
$12,410 separates $46,850 from the $59,260 top quarter, while only $8,080 separates it from $38,770. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Rehabilitation Counselors has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $18.63 at the bottom quarter, $22.52 at the midpoint, $28.49 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 Rehabilitation Counselors. The self-employed are excluded, so $46,850 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Rehabilitation Counselors, the hourly figure is $46,850 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