Food Scientists and Technologists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Food Scientists and Technologists offer sit among all 14,370 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

May 2024 employment stood at 14,370, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 2,350 jobs; the top three states sum to 28.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Iowa posts a location quotient of 2.80, 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 $49,580 or less, and one in ten earns $141,860 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.9 to 1 and the annual gap is $92,280. The mean ($92,190) versus median ($85,310) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

New Jersey posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $102,630, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Food Scientists and Technologists stands number 618 by employment and number 181 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 1% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.0% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 15 of the 36 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $85,310, 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 1,120 jobs, 7.8% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

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, $91,510 a year, against $106,560 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Food Scientists and Technologists paycheck, gross, is $3,281 every two weeks on an annual $85,310, which is $7,109 a month and $1,641 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($65,240) to the 75th ($111,700) is worth $46,460 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 $93,841 would sit between the median ($85,310) and the 75th percentile ($111,700), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $65,240, is $20,070 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Biochemists and Biophysicists, Social Science Research Assistants, Occupational Health and Safety Technicians, Forest and Conservation Technicians, Conservation Scientists, Physical Scientists, All Other. The full directory is on the Careers hub.