---
title: "Correctional Officer and Jailer"
description: "Guard inmates in penal or rehabilitative institutions in accordance with established regulations and procedures. May guard prisoners in transit between…"
canonical: "https://nuecareer.com/careers/correctional-officer-and-jailer"
last-updated: "2026-08-23T15:56:39.581Z"
---

# Correctional Officer and Jailer

**Category:** Protective Service · **SOC code:** 33-3012 · **O\*NET-SOC code:** 33-3012.00

Guard inmates in penal or rehabilitative institutions in accordance with established regulations and procedures. May guard prisoners in transit between jail, courtroom, prison, or other point. Includes deputy sheriffs and police who spend the majority of their time guarding prisoners in correctional institutions.

Also advertised as: Booking Officer; Community Services Officer (CSO); Correctional Officer; Corrections Officer (CO); Deputy Jailer; Detention Deputy; Detention Officer; Jail Officer.

## At a glance

- **Median annual wage:** $58,940 (BLS OEWS, May 2025)
- **Median hourly wage:** $28.34/hr
- **Wage range (10th–90th percentile):** $42,760 to $93,220, with the middle half between $48,640 and $75,850
- **Total US employment:** 380,500
- **Typical entry education:** High school
- **Preparation required:** Little or no preparation — O\*NET rates this "Job Zone 1-2: Very Little to Some Preparation Needed"
- **Projected growth:** -7.8% over 2024–2034 (BLS EP, 2024–2034)
- **Annual job openings:** 30,100 openings a year
- **AI-resilience score:** 56/100 — a NueCareer heuristic over O\*NET work activities and context, not a BLS or O\*NET figure

## Pay

National wage distribution, BLS OEWS, May 2025, across 380,500 US jobs.

| Percentile | Annual wage |
| --- | --- |
| 10th | $42,760 |
| 25th | $48,640 |
| 50th (median) | $58,940 |
| 75th | $75,850 |
| 90th | $93,220 |
| Mean (average) | $63,630 |

### Pay by state

The 15 highest-paying states, by median annual wage. The cost-of-living-adjusted column divides the state median by that state's BEA Regional Price Parity, so the columns answer different questions: the first is what the job pays there, the second is what that pay buys there.

| State | Median annual wage | Cost-of-living adjusted | Employment |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| CA | $96,370 | $87,039 | 37,860 |
| NJ | $94,770 | $87,101 | 7,570 |
| MA | $86,310 | $81,612 | 6,360 |
| OR | $83,690 | $80,969 | 3,650 |
| WA | $79,460 | $74,253 | 6,800 |
| IL | $79,190 | $79,223 | 12,190 |
| NY | $76,820 | $71,182 | 27,770 |
| NV | $76,490 | $76,506 | 3,240 |
| WI | $73,470 | $78,081 | 7,360 |
| AK | $71,360 | $69,715 | 850 |
| HI | $69,570 | $63,274 | 1,310 |
| UT | $67,290 | $68,063 | 2,050 |
| MN | $66,040 | $66,963 | 5,350 |
| DE | $65,880 | $66,007 | 1,730 |
| CT | $64,750 | $62,494 | 3,780 |

35 more states with published wage data are omitted here. The full table for all 50 states is at https://nuecareer.com/careers/correctional-officer-and-jailer/salary-by-state, or as JSON at https://nuecareer.com/api/v1/careers/correctional-officer-and-jailer.

## Outlook

BLS projects employment to move from 387,500 in the 2024–2034 base year to 357,400 by the end of the cycle — a loss of 30,100 jobs, or -7.8%. Declining: -7.8% against 3.1% projected for all occupations over the same cycle. About 30,100 openings a year are expected on average, counting openings from growth as well as from workers leaving the occupation permanently. Source: BLS EP, 2024–2034.

## How to get in

- **Typical entry education:** High school diploma or equivalent (BLS Employment Projections).
- **Preparation level:** Little or no preparation — O\*NET's preparation band for this occupation is "Job Zone 1-2: Very Little to Some Preparation Needed".
- **Related work experience typically required:** None.
- **Typical on-the-job training:** Moderate-term on-the-job training.

### Education people in this job actually hold

O\*NET surveys incumbents, so this distribution describes who is in the job today and can differ from the BLS entry requirement above.

| Education level | Share of workers |
| --- | --- |
| High School Diploma | 92.4% |
| Associate's Degree (or other 2-year degree) | 7.6% |

## What the work involves

- Participate in required job training.
- Inspect conditions of locks, window bars, grills, doors, and gates at correctional facilities to ensure security and help prevent escapes.
- Conduct fire, safety, and sanitation inspections.
- Provide to supervisors oral and written reports of the quality and quantity of work performed by inmates, inmate disturbances and rule violations, and unusual occurrences.
- Conduct head counts to ensure that each prisoner is present.
- Counsel inmates and respond to legitimate questions, concerns, and requests.
- Record information, such as prisoner identification, charges, and incidents of inmate disturbance, keeping daily logs of prisoner activities.
- Monitor conduct of prisoners in housing unit, or during work or recreational activities, according to established policies, regulations, and procedures, to prevent escape or violence.

## Skills and knowledge

### Essential skills

- Active Listening — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Monitoring — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Speaking — importance 3.9 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Critical Thinking — importance 3.8 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Reading Comprehension — importance 3.6 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Active Learning — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Writing — importance 3.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Learning Strategies — importance 3.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale

### Transferable skills

These are the skills that carry into other occupations, and they drive the related-occupation and career-change rankings on this site.

- Social Perceptiveness — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Coordination — importance 3.5 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Persuasion — importance 3.4 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Negotiation — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Complex Problem Solving — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Judgment and Decision Making — importance 3.3 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Instructing — importance 3.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Service Orientation — importance 3.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale

### Knowledge areas

- Public Safety and Security — importance 4.1 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- English Language — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Law and Government — importance 3.8 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Customer and Personal Service — importance 3.5 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Administration and Management — importance 3.5 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Computers and Electronics — importance 3.4 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale

### Abilities

- Oral Comprehension — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Oral Expression — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Problem Sensitivity — importance 4.0 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Deductive Reasoning — importance 3.8 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Inductive Reasoning — importance 3.8 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale
- Speech Clarity — importance 3.8 on the O\*NET 1–5 importance scale

## Who it suits

O\*NET rates every occupation on the six Holland (RIASEC) interest areas, on a 1–7 scale. This occupation's strongest areas are Realistic (R), Conventional (C), Social (S).

| Interest area | Score (1–7) |
| --- | --- |
| R — Realistic | 5.33 |
| C — Conventional | 4.81 |
| S — Social | 3.86 |
| E — Enterprising | 3.16 |
| I — Investigative | 1.69 |
| A — Artistic | 1.05 |

### Personality fit

These scores are **derived by NueCareer**, not published by any government agency: they are cosine similarities between a personality type's trait profile and this occupation's O\*NET interest and work-style ratings, expressed 0–100. Treat them as a starting point for exploration, not as evidence that a type belongs in a job.

| Type | Fit score (0–100) |
| --- | --- |
| ISFJ | 82.5 |
| ESTJ | 82.1 |
| ISTJ | 79.8 |
| ESFJ | 76.4 |
| ESTP | 59.6 |

Best-fitting types: ISFJ, ESTJ, ISTJ.

## Related occupations

O\*NET's primary related occupations, in its own ranked order.

- [First-Line Supervisor of Correctional Officers](https://nuecareer.com/careers/first-line-supervisor-of-correctional-officers) — median $77,970
- [Probation Officer and Correctional Treatment Specialist](https://nuecareer.com/careers/probation-officer-and-correctional-treatment-specialist) — median $66,270
- [Police Officer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/police-officer) — median $76,210
- [Bailiff](https://nuecareer.com/careers/bailiff) — median $56,600
- [First-Line Supervisor of Police and Detectives](https://nuecareer.com/careers/first-line-supervisor-of-police-and-detectives) — median $106,040
- [Detective and Criminal Investigator](https://nuecareer.com/careers/detective-and-criminal-investigator) — median $93,790
- [First-Line Supervisor of Security Workers](https://nuecareer.com/careers/first-line-supervisor-of-security-workers) — median $55,940
- [Transit and Railroad Police](https://nuecareer.com/careers/transit-and-railroad-police) — median $90,230
- [Security Guard](https://nuecareer.com/careers/security-guard) — median $38,020
- [Residential Advisor](https://nuecareer.com/careers/residential-advisor) — median $42,240

## Sources

- **O\*NET** — O\*NET 30.3 Database, May 2026. https://www.onetcenter.org/database.html
- **BLS OEWS** — BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. https://www.bls.gov/oes/
- **BLS EP** — BLS Employment Projections, Table 1.2, 2024–2034. https://www.bls.gov/emp/
- **BLS OOH** — BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2024–2034 edition. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/
- **BEA RPP** — BEA Regional Price Parities by State, 2024. https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area

---

This bank includes information from the O\*NET 30.3 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). O\*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. NueCareer has transformed the data by joining it to BLS wage and projection data and deriving facet, personality-fit and AI-resilience scores. BLS and BEA data are public domain (17 U.S.C. §105).

O\*NET content is used under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). How these figures are sourced and derived: https://nuecareer.com/careers/methodology

JSON representation of this page: https://nuecareer.com/api/v1/careers/correctional-officer-and-jailer