Occupation / job
Travel Agents
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
$50,160 against a $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — $140 apart. Travel Agents pays what the average job pays, so the decision has to be made on the work, the entry cost and the spread rather than on the wage.
55,110 people are employed in this work. Big enough for a real market in every major metro, small enough that experience in Travel Agents is still a distinguishing thing to have.
Selling services suits people who can explain something intangible clearly enough that a buyer will commit money to it before seeing it work.
We carry no verified training length for Travel Agents — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
$41,950 to $63,060 — 1.5x, or $1,759 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Travel Agents is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
The 25th percentile of $41,950 is only $8,070 off the $50,020 national midpoint. Being in the worst-paid quarter of Travel Agents still means being paid close to what the average American job pays.
Avoid it if variable income keeps you up at night, or if a bad quarter would be read by you as a verdict on yourself.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 55,110 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 $41,950 and $63,060 this is a normally shaped occupation. $50,160 is what the middle of Travel Agents earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
Put in money rather than ratios: $41,950 at the 25th percentile, $50,160 at the midpoint, $63,060 at the 75th. $21,110 separates the quarter of Travel Agents at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $63,060, the 75th percentile, is worth $12,900 a year more than the $50,160 midpoint and $21,110 more than the $41,950 a quarter of Travel Agents settle for.
The distance from the midpoint up to $63,060 is $12,900 — well over the $8,210 down to $41,950. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Travel Agents earns, and half the field is in that upper half.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $20.16 at the bottom quarter, $24.11 at the midpoint, $30.31 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
The $50,160 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 Travel Agents, the hourly figure is $50,160 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