Diagnostic Medical Sonographers 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 ($64,760) to the 90th ($123,170). 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

BLS counted 86,460 Diagnostic Medical Sonographers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.06% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in South Dakota, where the location quotient is 1.50, meaning the occupation holds 1.50 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 9,240 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 26.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $78,080 at the 25th percentile, $89,340 at the middle, $103,630 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $58,410, a ratio of 1.9 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

The state spread for Diagnostic Medical Sonographers runs from the $122,030 median in Hawaii down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (9,240 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Diagnostic Medical Sonographers stands number 292 by employment and number 165 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 9% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.9% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 26 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $89,340, 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 7,140 jobs, 8.3% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $29,480 a year, against $148,790 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Diagnostic Medical Sonographers paycheck, gross, is $3,436 every two weeks on an annual $89,340, which is $7,445 a month and $1,718 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($78,080) to the 75th ($103,630) is worth $25,550 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 $98,274 would sit between the median ($89,340) and the 75th percentile ($103,630), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $78,080, is $11,260 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Radiation Therapists, Cardiologists, Nuclear Medicine Technologists, Recreational Therapists, Audiologists, Orthopedic Surgeons, Except Pediatric. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.