Salaries / Retail Salesperson
Sales & Business · SOC 41-2031
Retail Salesperson salary
Retail salespeople help customers find and buy products in stores, from clothing to electronics.
Median annual
$35,410
Median hourly
$17.03
Typical range
$27,210 to $47,890
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS 2025. Figures are gross pay and vary by location, employer, and experience.
The pay range, visually.
Low end (about the 10th percentile), median, and high end (about the 90th percentile).
By state, at a glance
These at-a-glance figures are estimates derived from the national median and a state wage index, shown to give a rough sense of local differences. Pick any state (here or in the selector above) to look up its real figures.
Your skills are a business
Ideas we have for people in sales & business.
The same experience that earns a paycheck as a retail salesperson can start a business. Here are real ideas from our marketplace that fit this field.
Ecommerce and Shopify Virtual Assistant
Support online store owners with the daily grind of running a shop: adding and editing products, managing orders and customer service, updating listings, handling returns, and keeping the storefront running so the owner can focus on growth.
Open a Dedicated Glass and Headshop
Run a store built almost entirely around pipes, bongs, dab rigs, and smoking accessories, capturing the highest per-unit margins in the category by specializing in glass rather than diluting the floor with commodity vapes.
Sell Pre-Configured Support Automation to Small Shopify Stores
A productized service that installs working customer support automation into small Shopify stores: an AI assistant pre-trained on the store's policies and catalog that handles the where-is-my-order, returns, and sizing questions that are most of the inbox, with clean human handoff and honest escalation, set up for the owner rather than sold as another tool to configure.
Open an Ethnic or International Grocery Market
A full cultural supermarket serving a specific community: the produce, meat, spices, and staples a Hispanic, Asian, African, Halal, or other market needs and the chains do not stock, run as the neighborhood's primary grocery, not a boutique.
You could hire retail salespersons, not just be one.
We have a staffing calculator to price the work and a full course on how to start a staffing agency, so you can turn a field you already know into a business that puts other people to work.