Massachusetts Graphic Designers: Employment and Wage Context — May 2025

Source: BLS OEWS Query System, May 2025 state cross-industry estimates. Retrieved September 18, 2026. All four displayed fields are numeric in the source; none is missing or suppressed.

The findings above and this table use the same frozen snapshot. No chart compares jobs, dollars per hour, and dollars per year on a shared scale: their different units would make that visual comparison misleading.

1. Selection: one statewide Massachusetts row, one occupation (2018 SOC 27-1024), all covered industries and ownerships, and the May 2025 reference period. No geographic or occupational alternatives are substituted.
2. Mapping: use the official Graphic Designers occupation directly. This is not an estimate of Harborfield’s broader graphic and presentation design category. No NAICS-to-SOC conversion is performed.
3. Collection: read the official BLS OEWS query-system HTML table using the filters shown below. The row and source footnotes were checked on the retrieval date. Harborfield did not conduct the underlying employer survey.
4. Normalization and calculations: retain the source values and units. Currency and grouping characters are presentation only. The annual median is the BLS-published value, not a Harborfield multiplication of the rounded hourly median.
5. Missing values: all four selected fields are published numeric estimates with no suppression markers. Any future missing or suppressed field must retain that status and a reason; it must never become zero or an invented estimate.
6. Comparability: this is a single-period occupational description, not a time trend or a comparison of service categories. OEWS estimates combine survey panels; May 2025 identifies the estimates’ reference period, not a survey conducted only during that month.
7. Reproducibility: the page uses a fixed versioned snapshot, with no live API request or automatic refresh. A source revision or material correction requires an explicitly dated new publication version.

Harborfield’s research methodology

OEWS covers wage-and-salary employment and does not represent self-employed or freelance graphic designers.

• The coverage exclusion above prevents conclusions about self-employed designers, freelance pricing, or solo-practice income.
• Occupational employment is an estimate of jobs, not unique businesses, vacancies, customers, purchases, or market size.
• These are survey estimates, not exact counts. The employment relative standard error describes sampling precision; it does not account for every source of error and does not quantify uncertainty in median wages.
• The annual and hourly medians express the same wage concept on different time bases; they are not two independent earnings findings. Annualized wages do not establish the hours or annual earnings of an individual worker.
• A statewide estimate combines covered industries and locations. It does not isolate remote work, presentation design, a city, a client segment, or a particular experience level.
• The evidence supports no inference about market demand, profitability, business attractiveness, or success probability. No ranking, forecast, or recommended price is produced.