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The median pay is about $77,920 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $41,250 at the lower end to about $153,700 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
4 to 7 years after high school, on the usual route.
$200 to $46,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no license to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Limited demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$77,920
Bottom tenth
$41,250
Top tenth
$153,700
The national median is $77,920 a year, the bottom tenth earn $41,250 or less and the top tenth $153,700 or more, in the 2025 federal wage survey. That single occupation covers a book publisher's assistant in New York and a technical editor at a software company, so the spread is enormous.
$41,250 to $57,300
The bottom tenth and bottom quarter of editors, 2025
An editorial assistant at a publisher, magazine or local newsroom usually starts in this lower part of the range. Book publishing sits mostly in New York, which is also where rent is highest.
$106,100 or more
What the best paid quarter of editors earned in 2025
Moving up in this field is almost never about getting better at commas. It usually means a specialty nobody else can edit, or managing a team.
Roughly, all in
$200 to $46,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
There is no license and no legally required qualification, so the low end is somebody who learns by doing, two or three style manuals and a professional membership for the job listings, and builds a portfolio through student papers, small publications or freelance work. That cheap door is real but it is harder to walk through: most job adverts still ask for a degree and you are competing against people who have one. The high end is a four year degree at an in state public university plus a professional editing certificate. Be careful borrowing here, because first salaries in editing are low relative to the debt.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) every year. Be careful borrowing for this one: a private college degree is hard to pay back on a first salary near the bottom of the range.
Salary
Newsrooms, publishers, agencies and in-house content teams.
Freelance by the hour
Common for copy editing and proofreading. Rates depend on speed and specialty.
Freelance by the project
Book manuscripts are usually priced per project or per thousand words.
Contract and shift work
Many newsrooms now hire copy editors for night shifts on rolling contracts rather than staff jobs.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Nobody hires an editor who has not written. You come in through writing and move sideways.
High school diploma
Grade 12
Write constantly and get edited. Work on the school paper, the yearbook or a website where somebody else changes your words.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
English, journalism or communications is typical, but a science or history degree plus proven writing counts for more in specialist editing.
Student paper and internships
During college
The actual qualification. A summer on a real copy desk or at a publishing house beats any course.
First job: writer or editorial assistant
1 to 3 years
Fact checking, proofreading, chasing permissions, writing headlines. This is the apprenticeship, and the pay sits at the low end of the range.
Editor
3 to 5 years in
Copy editor, section editor, managing editor. From here the ladder runs through specialty or management.
English
Obviously, but the grammar half matters as much as the literature half.
Journalism or media studies
Deadlines and house style are learned habits, not talents.
A second language
Teaches you how sentences are built, and opens translation editing.
Any science course
Editors who can read a study are rare.
There is no license, no exam and no protected title. Anyone may call themselves an editor. What employers actually look at is an edit test: they hand you a messy draft and time you. Voluntary certificates exist, and the best known are the tiered editing certificates run jointly by Poynter and the Society for Editing. They help a freelancer look credible. They will not get you a staff job on their own.
Journalism schools dominate the newsroom route, but the degree matters less here than almost anywhere else.
Big journalism schools
Missouri, Northwestern, Syracuse and Arizona State run programs with real student newsrooms attached.
Any state university with a student paper
The paper is the training. The campus name is not.
Publishing courses
Short summer publishing institutes run at several universities and feed directly into book publishing hiring.
Online editing courses
Poynter and the Society for Editing run on-demand training you can take while working.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Technical editing
Software documentation, engineering manuals, standards. Steady and corporate.
Medical and scientific editing
Journals, drug companies and research institutes. Needs a science background.
Developmental editing
Working on structure and argument with an author before the sentences matter. The hardest kind.
Video and newsletter editing
Audiences moved to video and newsletters, and the editing work followed.
Knowing one style manual cold
The Associated Press Stylebook for news, the Chicago Manual of Style for books.
Basic HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and a publishing system
WordPress and similar tools. Editors who can publish the page themselves get hired first.
Fact-checking practice
Verifying dates, quotes and statistics is a named part of the job description.
Fast, clean typing
Unglamorous, and it decides how much you can take on.
A large share of editing now happens outside staff jobs. You build a handful of steady clients, charge by the hour or the project, and chase invoices. The upside is real: you choose the work, you can live anywhere, and a specialty lets you set your own rate. The downside is that you buy your own health insurance, income arrives unevenly, and January is always quiet. Most freelancers start part time while holding a salaried job.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
A queue of drafts and a clock. You read for sense first, then for accuracy, then line by line for grammar and style. You write the headline, check the facts and the names, cut 200 words because the space shrank, and send questions back to a writer who will not like them. Meetings about what is running tomorrow. In news the day ends when the page closes, which is often late.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
In 2017 a federal appeals court sided with delivery drivers at Oakhurst Dairy in Maine because a state overtime law had no comma before the last item in a list. The wording was genuinely ambiguous, the drivers won, and the company settled for $5 million.
The Associated Press Stylebook, first published in the 1950s, decides things like whether to write percent or the symbol. New editions land regularly and editors genuinely fight about the changes.
The federal career profile counts 105,000 editors in 2025 and expects the number to fall slightly by 2035. Retirements and moves still open about 7,900 jobs a year.
In the federal survey of editors, 69% said a new hire needs a bachelor's degree. Only 12% said a two year degree is enough.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Writing and media first, then the rest of the field. See every career in creative.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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