Office clerks in the United States earn a median of $45,010 a year. Pay starts near $30,310. The national 90th percentile is $64,680. This page does not publish a state top-of-range figure.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 (Office Clerks, General, SOC 43-9061). Employment 2,464,940. Last checked 22 September 2026. National percentiles via the BLS OEWS release as republished on O*NET OnLine wage tables.
Wages — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS, May 2025 (Office Clerks, General). Entry is the national 10th percentile. The top chip is the national 90th percentile, not a state. The middle half of workers earns $36,350 to $54,300. Hourly equivalents: $14.57, $21.64, and $31.10. BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook lists a high school diploma or equivalent as the typical entry-level education for general office clerks. The marker on the exposure bar is PayCrunch editorial context, not a BLS statistic. Updated 22 September 2026.
Do the mix of clerical work an office assigns: answer phones, file, enter records, run office machines, and keep the paper and the system on the same item.
AI tools that fit Office Clerk work September 2026
A short list of general tools. This is not a sponsored placement, not a weekly crawl, and not a product review with prices. Use whatever your employer already allows.
AI inside Word, Excel, and Outlook.
How a Office Clerk uses it: Turn a stack of notes into a filing list, or draft a reply you then check against the record.
Google's assistant in Docs and Gmail.
How a Office Clerk uses it: Summarize a thread into what was promised and what is still open.
A general writing assistant.
How a Office Clerk uses it: Rewrite a procedure into steps. Do not paste customer account numbers into a tool your office has not approved.
Office clerk: the record, the phone, and SOC 43-9061
General office clerks are SOC 43-9061. The locked chips are entry $30,310, median $45,010, and a national 90th percentile of $64,680. BLS counted 2,464,940 wage-and-salary workers in May 2025. The title covers duties too mixed to sit in a narrower clerical SOC. It is not the administrative-assistant page (SOC 43-6014) and it is not the shipping-clerk page.
The national range is wide
The 10th percentile is $30,310 and the national 90th is $64,680. The middle half sits between $36,350 and $54,300. The step from the median $45,010 to $64,680 is $19,670 a year. Offices pay the upper part of that national distribution for people who can find the record, keep the names consistent, and finish the form the regulation or the customer actually requires.
A file you can hand to someone else
The test is whether another person can open the folder and see the latest document, the date, and what is missing. A chat summary that is not tied to the file name is not the file. Spellings, account identifiers, and dates come from the source document.
Outlook
O*NET reports projected growth for 2024–2034 as a decline (minus 1 percent or lower). O*NET still projects about 282,400 openings a year over 2024–2034 from people leaving the occupation.
Locked wage chips on this page: entry $30,310, median $45,010, national 90th percentile $64,680. SOC 43-9061. If a sentence disagrees with those three figures, the figures win.
How to do the work that sits inside this pay band
These steps stay inside the published national range. They are not a promise that you will be paid the 90th percentile.
A second naming scheme is a lost document.
Here is our file-name pattern and a list of documents. Rename only the ones that break the pattern. Explain each change.A message without the ask is a second call.
Turn this phone scribble into a four-line message: caller, request, deadline, and what I already said.Retyping a number you did not look at is how the record drifts.
Compare this spreadsheet row to the source text I paste. List only the cells that disagree.Careers related to Office Clerk
Similar pay, same field
- Customer Service Representative $44,770
- Shipping Clerk $45,260
- Bank Teller $43,030
- Administrative Assistant $47,540
Where this can lead
- Bookkeeper $50,670
- Legal Secretary $55,570
- Office Supervisor $69,500
Wages in this list are the national medians printed on those pages. Every new page in this batch uses BLS OEWS May 2025.
Never used AI before? Start here (2 minutes).
Paste only facts you already have: a tag, a count, a calendar constraint, a file name. If the draft adds a number, a policy, or a product you did not provide, delete it.
Do not paste account numbers, full customer records, or anything your employer has told you to keep inside its own system.
TODO: PC_GEAR is not filled in this batch. No product links and no ASINs until a reviewed list exists. Do not invent ASINs.
TODO: state-wage table is not filled in this batch. The chips above are national OEWS May 2025 percentiles only. State medians are not estimated here.
Sources
- BLS OEWS — Office Clerks, General (SOC 43-9061)
- BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook — related profile
- O*NET OnLine summary for 43-9061.00 (2025 wages and 2024–2034 outlook category)
- Salary (10th, 25th, median, 75th, 90th) — national BLS OEWS May 2025.
- Employment — national OEWS May 2025 wage-and-salary employment, 2,464,940.
- Outlook — O*NET reports projected growth for 2024–2034 as a decline (minus 1 percent or lower). Projected openings: about 282,400 a year.
- Not on this page — state wages, metro wages, and product recommendations.
Check another occupation
These five pages are the highest-employment OEWS lines that were missing from the directory.