Dental Hygienists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($66,470) to the 90th ($120,060). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 219,070, or 0.14% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 22,940 jobs; the top three states sum to 24.1% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Alaska posts a location quotient of 1.69, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $66,470 or less, and one in ten earns $120,060 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.8 to 1 and the annual gap is $53,590. The mean ($93,890) versus median ($94,260) comparison shows an unusually symmetric ladder in this occupation.

Pay by state

Alaska posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $129,760, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Dental Hygienists stands number 152 by employment and number 150 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 4% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.3% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 24 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $94,260, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 10,240 jobs, 4.7% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 377 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Birmingham, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $59,960 a year, against $143,980 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Dental Hygienists paycheck, gross, is $3,625 every two weeks on an annual $94,260, which is $7,855 a month and $1,813 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($80,060) to the 75th ($102,920) is worth $22,860 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $103,686 would sit between the median ($94,260) and the 75th percentile ($102,920), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $80,060, is $14,200 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Exercise Physiologists, Neurologists, Dentists, All Other Specialists, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, Orthodontists, Medical Dosimetrists. The full directory is on the Careers hub.