Food Science Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Food Science Technicians worker at that point in the distribution, so $60,940 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 14,200 Food Science Technicians jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Idaho, where the location quotient is 4.17, meaning the occupation holds 4.17 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 4,000 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 40.3% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $37,760 or less, and one in ten earns $75,100 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.0 to 1 and the annual gap is $37,340. The mean ($54,400) versus median ($49,430) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 4,000 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Mississippi would lead at $64,600. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Food Science Technicians stands number 624 by employment and number 531 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 41% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.0% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 16 of the 35 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $49,430, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 810 jobs, 5.7% 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, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $55,160 a year, against $59,790 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,119 a month before tax, $1,901 biweekly, $951 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($43,990) to the 75th ($60,940) is worth $16,950 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $54,373 would sit between the median ($49,430) and the 75th percentile ($60,940), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $43,990, is $5,440 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers, Physicists, Microbiologists, Forensic Science Technicians, Psychologists, All Other, Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.