Emergency Medical Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Emergency Medical Technicians ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $36,730. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

With 177,980 jobs nationally, Emergency Medical Technicians make up 0.12% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 19,020 of those jobs, the top three states hold 26.4%, and the deepest concentration sits in North Dakota (location quotient 2.59, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $29,370 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($60,780) is 1.9 times the 10th percentile ($31,410), a gap of $29,370 a year. The mean of $44,790 sitting above the median of $41,340 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Hawaii at $61,310; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Emergency Medical Technicians stands number 176 by employment and number 683 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 58% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.9% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $41,340, 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 13,260 jobs, 7.5% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 298 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $32,600 a year, against $78,620 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

As a household number, $41,340 a year is $3,445 a month gross, $1,590 every two weeks, $795 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,730) to the 75th ($48,160) is worth $11,430 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $3,445 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $45,474 would sit between the median ($41,340) and the 75th percentile ($48,160), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,730, is $4,610 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

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: Anesthesiologists, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists, Chiropractors, Health Information Technologists and Medical Registrars, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Workers, All Other, Emergency Medicine Physicians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.