Occupation / job
Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive
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
A $47,540 median against $50,020 across all occupations puts Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive within $206 a month of the exact middle of the American labour market. Nothing in the headline number argues either way.
1,706,790 people are employed as Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive, 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.
Administrative assistant work suits people who make an organisation function and are content that this is mostly invisible when done well and highly visible when not.
How long it takes to become one of the 1,706,790 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
A quarter of Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive earn under $38,830 and a quarter over $58,000 — 1.5x, or $19,170 apart. Narrow spreads usually mean a pay schedule, which is stability bought at the price of upside.
A quarter of the field earns under $38,830 — $11,190 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 want a visible career ladder; the routes up out of administration are narrow and mostly sideways first.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 1,706,790 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
$38,830 to $58,000 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: $38,830 at the 25th percentile, $47,540 at the midpoint, $58,000 at the 75th. $19,170 separates the quarter of Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $58,000. Reaching it from the $47,540 midpoint is $10,460 a year; reaching it from the $38,830 that the bottom quarter of Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive earn is $19,170.
From $47,540 it is $8,710 down to the bottom quarter and $10,460 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $18.66 at the bottom quarter, $22.85 at the midpoint, $27.88 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 Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $47,540 describes them.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $47,540 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