Administrative Assistant Salary in New York 2026,
$49,600 Median | BLS Data by City

The published New York figure is $49,600 a year, or $23.85 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $37,330 at the 10th percentile to $64,840 at the 90th. That is 4.3% above the national median of $47,540. The row is SOC 43-6014, Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive — broader than the job title, and with the three highest-paid administrative niches deliberately excluded from it.

New York-Newark-Jersey City leads at $51,440, then Albany-Schenectady-Troy $49,330, Kingston $48,620, Syracuse $48,500 and Ithaca $47,990. The whole range is under $3,500 wide. In practice that means the metro table is not a useful lever for this occupation in New York — an upstate role at $49,330 and a downstate role at $51,440 are nearly the same wage against very different housing costs.

No. New York licenses roughly fifty professions through the State Education Department's Office of the Professions and administrative support is not one of them, so there is no examination, registration or continuing-education requirement to satisfy. Employers screen on software fluency and on sector familiarity instead. Voluntary certifications exist and some New York employers value them as a sorting device, but none of them is a legal requirement and none of them appears in the wage data as a distinct tier.

It is tight, and the tax arithmetic makes it tighter. The state income tax runs from 4% to 10.9% and a New York City resident pays an additional 3.078% to 3.876% city income tax on top of it, so the 4.3% premium over the national median is largely gone before housing enters the calculation. The New York-Newark-Jersey City metro figure of $51,440 is a median rather than a starting salary, and the 10th percentile of $37,330 is the more realistic number for a first downstate role.

By acquiring something the general pool does not have. The $59,100 seventy-fifth percentile and $64,840 ninetieth are occupied by people coordinating other administrative staff or holding a specialism — procurement, regulated document handling, event and travel logistics at scale. The other route out of the band entirely is into the excluded niches: legal, medical and executive administrative work sit on different SOC rows in this state and pay on different scales.

Because administrative pay is set against a local clerical labour supply that New York has in abundance, not against the state's headline industries. The occupations that carry a large New York premium — finance, law, media — pay it to the people doing the specialised work, and the general administrative support attached to them is priced against everyone else who can do the same tasks. A location quotient of 1.15 confirms the supply side: the state employs these workers at above the national rate, and 122,490 of them compete for the same roles.

It excludes exactly the administrative jobs a New Yorker is most likely to be thinking of. SOC 43-6014 carves out legal, medical and executive secretaries, and those are the three tracks where a New York administrative career actually pays — a legal secretary at a Manhattan firm or an executive assistant at a large employer is not in this data at all. The figure is accurate for what it measures and misleading if read as the ceiling for administrative work in this state.

Sector and scope, in that order, because geography barely moves it at all. Financial services, professional services and healthcare administration pay above general corporate and non-profit administration in this state, and the gap between them is most of the distance from the $43,920 twenty-fifth percentile to the $59,100 seventy-fifth. Scope — supporting one manager versus running a department's administrative operation — supplies the rest. Overtime is a real component in the unionised and public-sector parts of the New York workforce, where scheduled hours and premium rates are set by contract rather than by negotiation.