What a correctional officer earns, by metro

A correctional officer in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara has a median wage of $132,670. In Hammond the median is $29,320. That is a 4.52-fold difference for the same job title, which is unusually wide even by the standards of a country this large — and it means a national average for this role is close to meaningless.

What the percentile band tells you

Ten per cent of correctional officers earn below $42,760 and ten per cent above $93,220 — a 2.18× band. The upside from median to 90th percentile is 58%, which is a normal amount of room for experience and specialisation to matter. An offer below the 25th percentile is worth questioning; one above the 75th is worth taking seriously.

Why the range is 4.52× wide

6 of the ten best-paying metros for correctional officers are in CA. When one state dominates the top of the table like this, cost of living is doing part of the work but rarely all of it — state licensing rules, public-sector pay scales and the presence of a few large employers usually explain the rest. If you are comparing an offer in CA against one elsewhere, adjust for housing before concluding anything.

Highest paying metros

Lowest paying metros

North Florida nonmetropolitan area is the cluster

North Florida nonmetropolitan area has 16.82× the national concentration of correctional officers — the densest market in the country for this role, with 4,640 employed locally. Pay there is $47,130, which does not put it near the top of the pay table. Concentration and compensation are different things — a dense market is easier to get hired in and easier to move around within, but the competition that makes it dense also caps what employers need to offer.

Where the role is most concentrated

Largest employers by metro

Current openings

About this data

Figures come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme, May 2025 release, SOC code 33-3012. OEWS surveys employers, so it reports what is actually paid rather than what job advertisements claim, and it excludes the self-employed. Estimates are published for 404 of 528 metropolitan areas; the remaining 124 had too few survey responses for BLS to publish without risking disclosure, so they are absent here rather than estimated. For a specialised role that is normal. Read the methodology.