Occupation / job
Telemarketers
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 median of $35,450 against the $50,020 all-occupation figure leaves Telemarketers 29% behind — $14,570 across a year. Whether that is workable depends almost entirely on where you would be doing it.
Employment stands at 58,430. Telemarketers 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.
These sales roles suit people genuinely comfortable with rejection as a statistical input rather than a verdict, and who want pay tied to output more than to hours.
No verified preparation time is on file for Telemarketers. 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
The middle half runs $29,640 to $40,230 — $882 a month between the quarters, a 1.4x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.
The bottom quarter of Telemarketers earns under $29,640 — $20,380 below the $50,020 national midpoint, or $14.25 an hour. A floor that low means the occupation cannot be judged on its median alone; a quarter of the people in it are somewhere else entirely.
Avoid it if you cannot fund the months before the pipeline produces anything.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 58,430 figure counts people already working as Telemarketers, 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
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $35,450 is a genuinely representative number for Telemarketers and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $29,640 and $40,230. That is $10,590 of range, with $35,450 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $40,230, the 75th percentile, is worth $4,780 a year more than the $35,450 midpoint and $10,590 more than the $29,640 a quarter of Telemarketers settle for.
The fall from $35,450 to the $29,640 bottom quarter is $5,810; the climb to the $40,230 top quarter is $4,780. Slightly more of the range lies below the midpoint than above it, so the downside is the bigger movement here.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $14.25 at the bottom quarter, $17.04 at the midpoint, $19.34 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 Telemarketers. The self-employed are excluded, so $35,450 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $35,450 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