Occupation / job
Tax Preparers
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
Tax Preparers pays $54,920, a little over the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — $4,900 a year clear, or $2.35 an hour. A margin that size is worth having but is not on its own a reason to take on an entry requirement.
Employment stands at 76,480. Tax Preparers is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
Financial specialist work suits people who are precise about other people’s money and unbothered that the calendar, not the workload, decides when the pressure arrives.
No verified preparation time is on file for Tax Preparers. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
A quarter earn under $38,910, a quarter over $76,300: $3,115 a month between them at a 2.0x ratio. Planning around the midpoint of a spread this wide is planning around a number very few people in Tax Preparers actually earn.
The 25th percentile is $38,910 — $18.70 an hour, and $11,110 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 would find it hard to deliver an unwelcome finding to the person who commissioned the work.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 76,480 figure counts people already working as Tax Preparers, 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
A 2.0x ratio says the label covers materially different work. Somewhere between $38,910 and $76,300, employer type, sub-speciality or credential is doing the sorting that the job title is not.
In cash terms the middle half of Tax Preparers runs $38,910 to $76,300 — $37,390 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $54,920.
Between $38,910 and $76,300 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $54,920. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $21,380; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $37,390.
From $54,920 it is $16,010 down to the bottom quarter and $21,380 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: $18.70 at the bottom quarter, $26.40 at the midpoint, $36.68 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 Tax Preparers for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $54,920 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Tax Preparers, the hourly figure is $54,920 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