Substance Abuse Counselor job description
1,038 verified openings in Behavioral & Mental Health
BLS does not publish a wage line for substance abuse counselors on their own. The figures come from 21-1018, which pools substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors into a single group of 491,930 workers. For that combined group the May 2025 median was $59,350, and the published range spans $38,940 to $97,590. O*NET keeps the narrower occupation separate: counseling people with alcohol, tobacco, drug, gambling, or eating disorder problems, one to one, in groups, or through prevention programs.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
Three things come before the rest: keeping accurate records of patient history, progress, and services provided; counseling clients individually and in group sessions; and assessing degree of dependency by collecting and analyzing urine samples. Counselors build treatment plans from client histories, revise them as a client's status changes, run program orientation sessions, follow discharged patients to see whether the treatment held, and coordinate with courts, probation officers, and community agencies.
Common Skills and Technologies
Speaking and active listening tie at the top, with critical thinking and social perceptiveness just behind. Persuasion makes the top ten, which follows from work where a treatment plan gets revised on the counselor's read of the client. The software is generic. Office is the whole stack, and medical software, scheduling tools, and database systems show up as categories with no product attached.
Education, Training, and Career Path
O*NET rates the occupation as needing graduate-school preparation, and the reported credentials run much wider than that. Master's degrees account for 41 percent of respondents, while high school diplomas and associate degrees account for about 24 percent each, with a post-master's certificate or a bachelor's covering the remainder. A large share of this workforce entered without a four-year degree. State credentials show up plainly in the titles people report: certified alcohol and drug counselor, chemical dependency professional, and drug and alcohol treatment specialist.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 21-1011.00 Substance Abuse and Behavioral Disorder Counselors, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/21-1011.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 21-1018, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes211018.htm.