Administrative Assistant Salary in California 2026,
$55,400 Median | BLS Data by City

The published California figure is $55,400 a year, or $26.64 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $38,060 at the 10th percentile to $78,170 at the 90th and quartiles at $46,390 and $65,400. That is 16.5% above the national median of $47,540. The row is SOC 43-6014, which explicitly excludes legal, medical and executive secretaries — the three best-paid administrative niches.

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara at $62,940, then San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont $62,110, Napa $58,810, Santa Rosa-Petaluma $57,720 and Santa Cruz-Watsonville $57,510. The whole spread is under ten percent, which is remarkably flat for California. Geography is a weak lever in this occupation, and a Bay Area role carries Bay Area housing costs for a modest wage difference.

In most cases yes, because the role is typically non-exempt. California requires overtime after eight hours in a day as well as after forty in a week, and mandates meal and rest periods with premium pay owed when they are missed. Those provisions are more generous than federal law and than almost every other state's, and in a role with regular overtime they are a material part of actual earnings that the annual median only partly reflects.

The location quotient of 0.79 across 158,630 jobs says California uses them at about four-fifths the national rate. The likeliest explanation is that California employers — technology firms especially — adopted calendar, expense and document automation early and never rebuilt the headcount. The same trend is national, which is why the occupation's projection is negative, but California appears further through it. That is consistent with above-national pay: the roles that survive are the ones doing work the software cannot.

It is, but with a clear-eyed view of the SOC exclusions. This row leaves out legal, medical and executive secretaries, and those are precisely the tracks where administrative careers in California pay best — the executive assistant row publishes a substantially higher median. Reading the $65,400 seventy-fifth percentile as the realistic ceiling for general administrative work and treating the specialist tracks as separate occupations with separate ladders is the honest framing.

It means the premium is not keeping pace. California's $55,400 sits below Massachusetts $57,940, Washington $57,330 and Connecticut $57,210, all of which are cheaper places to live, and above Rhode Island $52,140 and Oregon $51,740. For an occupation whose wage is set against a broad local clerical labour supply rather than against the state's headline industries, that is what happens: California has an enormous population of people who can do this work, and the technology and entertainment sectors that command premiums pay them to the specialists, not to the general administrative support attached to them. The 16.5% premium over the national median is real; it is simply smaller than California's cost differential.

Substantially. SOC 43-6014 carves out legal, medical and executive secretaries and counts everyone else, so this page describes the general pool after the three best-paid specialisms have been removed. In California the executive assistant row publishes a median well above this one, and legal and medical administrative work sit on their own codes too. A candidate treating administrative support as a career rather than a first job should be planning toward one of those excluded tracks from early on, because the general pool's ceiling — the $78,170 ninetieth percentile — is reached by coordination and specialism rather than by seniority.

Larger than in most occupations, because most administrative assistants are non-exempt and actually work the hours the rules govern. Daily overtime after eight hours means a long day is paid at a premium even in a week under forty hours, which is not true federally. Meal and rest period premiums add a further protection with real cash value when they are missed. And the pay transparency requirement means a California administrative assistant can see the posted range before applying, which in an occupation with a flat metro table and modest differentials is the most efficient way to find the better-paying employers.