--- title: This Map Shows the Best-Paying Company In Every State description: New data reveals what company pays the best median salary in every state. authors: - name: Ian Salisbury role: Senior Editor url: https://money.com/author/ian-salisbury-2/ bio: Ian Salisbury was a senior editor at Money, focusing on investing, banks and mortgage. at_money_since: 2013 articles: 91 covers: - Economy and Politics - Housing - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Personal Finance - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes former_staff: true published: '2018-05-29T10:00:35.000Z' modified: '2024-05-16T13:09:56.000Z' section: Career Advice tags: - compensation - Inequality - pay word_count: 300 canonical: https://money.com/best-paying-companies/ type: Article source: structured-blocks --- > **Disclosure:** We research all brands listed and may earn a fee from our partners. Research and financial considerations may influence how brands are displayed. Not all brands are included. [Learn more](https://money.com/page/disclaimer/). ![This Map Shows the Best-Paying Company In Every State](https://img.money.com/2018/05/180529-best-paying-companies-by-state.jpg?quality=85&w=1012&h=569&crop=1) You may think earning a big salary means climbing the corporate ladder. Not necessarily. Many U.S. companies offer six-figure salaries even to rank-and-file workers. A few, like California-based cancer-research company Geron Corp. (median pay: $500,250) and New Jersey clean-energy firm NRG Yield (median pay: $964,000), hand out upwards of half a million dollars or more. Those numbers are part of a trove of new data companies are being required to [make public for the first time](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/8/17212796/ceo-pay-ratio-corporate-governance-wealth-inequality) as part of their annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Designed to give investors a way to gauge chief executive pay, the numbers also highlight which companies are most generous to their everyday staffs. To give a flavor of what's available across different industries and parts of the country, Money highlighted the best-paying employer headquartered in each state, [using figures compiled by the labor group AFL-CIO](https://aflcio.org/paywatch) for companies in the Russell 3000 stock market index. (Figures are for median pay, meaning they represent the mid-point for each company's payroll, with an equal number of employees earning more and an equal number earning less. Experts consider the median to be a better indicator of "typical" pay than the average since a few exorbitantly paid executives can dramatically skew the average upwards.) Of course, snagging a job at one of these deep-pocked employers isn't just a matter of good luck. Many of these firms have small staffs — think a few dozen employees or fewer — in niches like managing real estate or biotechnology. But that's not always the case. The median salary at Entergy a Louisiana-based energy company with 13,000 workers is $124,000. At Textron, the Rhode Island-based maker of Bell Helicopters and Cessna aircraft, with 37,000 employees, it's more than $90,000. 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