Interior Designer Salary in New York 2026,
$75,580 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $75,580 a year, or $36.34 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 12.5% above the national median of $67,190. The band runs $35,990 at the 10th percentile to $125,620 at the 90th, with the middle half between $48,980 and $93,100. That is a wide spread for a design occupation and it mostly separates residential and junior studio work from commercial and institutional project leadership.

New York-Newark-Jersey City at $76,580, and nothing else is close: Rochester $58,130, Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh $57,320, Buffalo-Cheektowaga $56,420 and Albany-Schenectady-Troy $55,380 sit within about three thousand dollars of each other. Interior design in this state is effectively a single-market profession, and the upstate metros are paying for a different kind of work.

Not in the sense of a practice act. New York issues a Certified Interior Designer title certification through the State Education Department's Office of the Professions, and what is restricted is the title, not the work — anyone in New York may design interiors. The certification matters commercially: institutional, hospitality and public-sector procurement in this state increasingly specifies it, and certified designers can stamp certain interior construction documents. That is the practical difference between the $48,980 quarter-point and the $93,100 seventy-fifth percentile.

It is a credential of the State Education Department's Office of the Professions rather than a trade body, which is what makes it enforceable as a title in New York. It rests on the standard combination the profession uses nationally — accredited education, documented supervised experience and the national qualifying examination — and it is the gateway to the commercial and institutional work that sits above the $75,580 median. Because New York has no practice act, an uncertified designer is not doing anything unlawful by working; they simply cannot use the protected title or the specification advantages that come with it.

At the $75,580 median, state income tax lands in the middle of New York's 4% to 10.9% progressive range. The larger consideration is residence: a New York City resident pays an additional city income tax of 3.078% to 3.876%, and the city is where almost all of this state's design work sits. Employees also fund Paid Family Leave at 0.432% of wages, capped at $411.91 in 2026, plus statutory disability coverage of up to $0.60 a week. Self-employed designers, of whom this profession has many, handle all of it through quarterly estimates instead.

Because the occupation's New York employment is not concentrated at the top of the market. The $76,580 metro figure for New York-Newark-Jersey City includes the enormous volume of residential decorating, furniture retail design services and junior studio labour that a city this size supports, alongside the high-end commercial practices that make the city's reputation. Those two populations sit in one estimate. The $125,620 ninetieth percentile is where the visible New York design economy actually lives, and it is 87% above the national median — the median simply is not measuring that tier.

Interior design has one of the highest self-employment rates of any occupation in this data, and OEWS covers employees on payrolls. Sole practitioners, contract designers and principals paying themselves through their own firms are substantially under-represented, and their income is not a wage in the sense the survey measures. Project-based contracting is also common in New York specifically, which means part-year employment shows up as low annual wages. Read $35,990 at the 10th percentile as partly a duration artefact, not purely a rate.

Sector first: moving from residential into commercial, hospitality and institutional work is the largest single step in this band, and it is what the distance from $48,980 to $93,100 mostly measures. The NYSED Certified Interior Designer title second, because it is what institutional and public procurement specifies. Market third — New York-Newark-Jersey City at $76,580 against the upstate metros in the mid-fifties is roughly a twenty-thousand-dollar decision. Practice ownership fourth, though it moves the designer out of the wage data this page measures.