Dietitians and Nutritionists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Dietitians and Nutritionists offer sit among all 76,570 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 76,570 Dietitians and Nutritionists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.05% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Delaware, where the location quotient is 1.51, meaning the occupation holds 1.51 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 9,630 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 28.8% of the national total.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $52,930 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($101,760) is 2.1 times the 10th percentile ($48,830), a gap of $52,930 a year. The mean of $74,770 sitting above the median of $73,850 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 9,630 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $93,640. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Dietitians and Nutritionists stands number 310 by employment and number 261 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 25% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 16 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $73,850, 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 5,370 jobs, 7.0% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $49,530 a year, against $109,220 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $73,850 works out to $6,154 a month before taxes, $2,840 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,420 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($61,260) to the 75th ($85,200) is worth $23,940 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 $81,235 would sit between the median ($73,850) and the 75th percentile ($85,200), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $61,260, is $12,590 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric, Physicians, Pathologists, Hearing Aid Specialists, Dermatologists, Orthotists and Prosthetists, Podiatrists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.