USA Recruitment Salary Report 2026

Median pay by recruiting specialization runs from $50,000 for staffing and agency recruiters to $114,400 for technical recruiters, a spread of about 129%. The gap tracks what a recruiter is hired to fill rather than how senior they are. Technical recruiting pays most, followed by sales and GTM recruiting at $98,000. Talent acquisition specialists ($87,500) and talent sourcers ($87,000) sit almost level, which tends to surprise people who assume sourcing is a junior version of full-cycle work. Campus and early-careers recruiters land at $75,020, generalist recruiters at $67,923, and corporate recruiters at $60,000. Recruiting coordinators ($57,826) and healthcare recruiters ($57,500) sit at the bottom alongside agency roles. Two things to keep in mind when reading this. Base pay understates agency and staffing work, where commission carries much of total earnings. And the tier medians shown further down run higher at the top end than any role here, because this list covers individual-contributor specializations while the tier view also includes recruiting leadership. The feed carries no posting count per role, so treat the exact ordering as directional.

Washington leads states at $79,000, narrowly ahead of New York at $76,000 and California at $75,000. Colorado follows at $72,000 and Illinois at $71,000, then Georgia at $67,000, Texas at $61,000 and Florida lowest at $59,000, a top-to-bottom spread of about 34%. City medians run higher and cluster more tightly at the top: San Francisco at $91,000, New York at $84,000, Boston at $81,000, then Seattle and Los Angeles both at $80,000. Chicago and Austin tie at $75,000, Denver sits at $73,000, Atlanta at $71,000 and Miami at $65,000. Washington topping the state table while Seattle trails San Francisco by $11,000 is a useful warning about state-level figures, which pool metro and non-metro postings in different proportions from one state to the next. Neither cut carries a posting count per item, so read both as directional rather than as a precise ranking.

Across the five months with enough disclosed pay to report, the posted median moves from $74,880 in February to $71,494 in June, a shift of about 4.5%. That is a small move measured on a subset. Only 41.2% of postings disclose pay at all, so every monthly point rests on the disclosed slice rather than the full volume, and the mix of roles posted shifts from month to month. We suppress January, where roughly 69 postings disclosed a range, below the floor we use before publishing a monthly point. May clears that floor at about 173 disclosed, but its total volume of 420 postings sits far below the months on either side of it, so it is the least certain point on the line. Read the overall shape here, not any individual month.

Two signals in this section come from Glozo data that public salary sources do not publish. Against 6,836 active postings, the industry carries a measured talent pool of 327,487 people. That works out to roughly 48 available professionals for every open role, which puts recruiting among the deeper supply markets rather than the tight ones. Postings clear in 9.3 days on average. Campus and early-careers roles stay open longest at 12 days, followed by talent acquisition specialists at 10.1 days, then healthcare recruiters and generalist recruiters at 9.4 days each. Talent sourcers close fastest at 7 days, with corporate recruiters at 7.5 and a cluster of agency, sales and technical roles plus coordinators between 8.7 and 8.9 days. The pattern is consistent with the supply picture: the roles that stay open longest are the seasonal and specialized ones, and the fastest are those with the deepest pool to draw from.

Full-time work dominates at 82.0% of postings. Contract roles account for 12.3%, and it is worth being precise about what that covers: these are recruiters engaged on contract, not the contingent workers they place. Part-time is 2.5%, internships 1.9% and temporary work 1.3%. The internship share carries more weight than its size suggests, because it is one of the few visible entry routes into an occupation whose candidate pool is only 2% entry level.

Skill premiums are where the market signals its direction most clearly. AI sourcing carries the largest premium at 32%, ahead of recruitment analytics at 23.4% and talent intelligence at 21%. All three describe the same shift. Employers pay more for recruiters who can work with data and automated tooling than for recruiters who are fluent in one particular product. What sits lower supports that reading. LinkedIn Recruiter, still the default tool of the profession, carries a 15.1% premium. Boolean search, for years the defining technical skill of sourcing, is at 13.4%. Workday recruiting is at 7.8% and stakeholder management at 5%. Tool fluency is worth real money, but consistently less than the analytical layer sitting above it.

The pool of 327,487 recruiting professionals concentrates heavily in the middle of the ladder. Specialists make up 70.6% of it, experts 20.3%, leaders 7.1%, and entry level just 2.0%. The entry share is the figure worth pausing on. An occupation that does as much hiring as this one has almost no measured junior supply, which lines up with campus and early-careers postings staying open longest of any role at 12 days. These figures cover the civilian recruitment industry. They exclude military recruiting roles, which follow a separate pay structure and career model and sit in a different industry classification from commercial employment services.

The gender pay figures here come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, not from Glozo postings. For the occupation group that contains recruiting, BLS reports a median of $73,372 for men against $63,024 for women, a gap of 14.1%. The national gap across all occupations is 17.9%. Both numbers come from the same BLS series, so the comparison holds: the gap in this occupation group is narrower than the national one, though narrower is not the same as small. Glozo does not collect gender data on candidates or postings, and none of the salary figures elsewhere in this report are broken out by gender.