Biochemists and Biophysicists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Biochemists and Biophysicists offer sit among all 34,520 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 34,520 Biochemists and Biophysicists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Massachusetts, where the location quotient is 16.59, meaning the occupation holds 16.59 times its national share of local jobs. Massachusetts employs the most people outright, 13,530 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 58.7% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $64,890 or less, and one in ten earns $168,900 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.6 to 1 and the annual gap is $104,010. The mean ($115,570) versus median ($103,650) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 35 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Florida at $148,880; the jobs leader is Massachusetts:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Biochemists and Biophysicists stands number 458 by employment and number 105 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations, the group median wage is $84,150 across 48 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 23% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.4% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 8 of the 31 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $103,650, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH is the largest metro employer with 12,430 jobs, 36.0% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $104,000 a year, against $142,170 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $103,650 works out to $8,638 a month before taxes, $3,987 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,993 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($78,730) to the 75th ($134,460) is worth $55,730 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $114,015 would sit between the median ($103,650) and the 75th percentile ($134,460), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $78,730, is $24,920 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations

Sibling occupations in Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations: Political Scientists, Hydrologists, Historians, Sociologists, Hydrologic Technicians, Animal Scientists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.