2026 Edition · An annual reference on what work pays

Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA metropolitan area. Estimated employment 660.

Data released May 2025 BLS OEWS · SOC 43-6012
Fig. 1 — The wage rule

Where you sit in the distribution

Drag the marker, or type a figure
$87,270 · 50th
$52,77010th
$61,85025th
$87,27050th
$99,94075th
$126,88090th

That is the medianhalf of people in this occupation in San Jose earn more.

Table 1 — Adjusted

$87,270 in San Jose buys what $79,000 buys across the country as a whole.

San Jose's regional price parity is 110.4 — well above the national average — a dollar here buys noticeably less than in the US as a whole. Adjusted figures for other metros are in the nearby-metros table below.

Table 2 — Nearby metros

The same job, elsewhere in California

Adjusted figures apply each metro's regional price parity, so the columns are directly comparable.

Metro areaMedianAdjustedRPPvs. San Jose
San Jose This page$87,270$79,000110.4
San Francisco$79,410$68,700115.6−13.1%
Santa Cruz$77,780$70,800109.9−10.4%
Salinas$75,150$68,900109.0−12.8%
Santa Maria$74,360$68,300108.8−13.5%
Oxnard$71,670$64,800110.5−18.0%
Vallejo$64,850$59,800108.5−24.4%
Los Angeles$62,620$55,100113.6−30.2%

Price parity and difference against San Jose are in the full table on wider screens.

Fig. 2 — Five-year trend

Nominal against real

The same median, once as published and once restated in 2025 dollars.

60k80k100k120k 20212022202320242025
Nominal, as published Real, in 2025 dollars US$ thousands

Published pay rose 15.1% over the five years to 2025. Adjusted for inflation it fell 3.1% — prices rose faster than pay since 2021. The two lines meet at the right edge by construction, since 2025 is the base year.

Sources

How this page was made

Wage data
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 release. Public domain.
Price parity
Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities, 2024.
Inflation
Real figures deflate by CPI-U annual averages (BLS, all items, US city average).
Employment
660 employed in this occupation in the metro (BLS estimate; excludes the self-employed).
Occupation
SOC 43-6012, Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants. Mapped to our taxonomy as legal-secretaries-and-administrative-assistants.

Percentiles are reported exactly as released and are never interpolated between published values. We take no payment from employers, recruiters or anyone else for how any figure is presented.