Occupation / job
Social and Human Service Assistants
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
Social and Human Service Assistants pays $45,930 where the typical job pays $50,020 — $1.96 an hour apart. That is close enough to average that the interesting numbers on this page are the percentiles, not the median.
437,860 people do this work. An occupation this large has a published, well-known going rate — which means less scope to be underpaid and less scope to negotiate above it.
This work suits people who can be useful to someone inside a system that is not resourced to fix their situation, and who can measure a good day in something other than resolution.
How long it takes to become one of the 437,860 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 Social and Human Service Assistants earn under $38,150 and a quarter over $54,350 — 1.4x, or $16,200 apart. Narrow spreads usually mean a pay schedule, which is stability bought at the price of upside.
The 25th percentile is $38,150 — $18.34 an hour, and $11,870 below the $50,020 typical American job. Entry-level in this field means that number, not the midpoint, so budget against it.
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. 437,860 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
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $45,930 is a genuinely representative number for Social and Human Service Assistants and the main variable left is where you live.
Put in money rather than ratios: $38,150 at the 25th percentile, $45,930 at the midpoint, $54,350 at the 75th. $16,200 separates the quarter of Social and Human Service Assistants at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $38,150 and $54,350 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $45,930. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $8,420; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $16,200.
$45,930 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $7,780 above the bottom quarter, $8,420 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Social and Human Service Assistants is $22.08 an hour. The quarters sit at $18.34 and $26.12, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $45,930 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.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Social and Human Service Assistants, the hourly figure is $45,930 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