Forensic Science Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Forensic Science Technicians offer sit among all 19,450 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 19,450, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 3,100 jobs; the top three states sum to 38.7% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Arizona posts a location quotient of 2.19, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $53,310 at the 25th percentile, $67,440 at the middle, $88,710 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $65,150, a ratio of 2.4 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

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 45 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Illinois at $117,590; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Forensic Science Technicians stands number 569 by employment and number 302 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 20% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.3% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 19 of the 44 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $67,440, 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 1,210 jobs, 6.2% 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $58,170 a year, against $100,150 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. 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

As a household number, $67,440 a year is $5,620 a month gross, $2,594 every two weeks, $1,297 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($53,310) to the 75th ($88,710) is worth $35,400 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 $5,620 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 $74,184 would sit between the median ($67,440) and the 75th percentile ($88,710), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $53,310, is $14,130 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

Sibling occupations in Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations: Physical Scientists, All Other, Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers, Physicists, Microbiologists, Psychologists, All Other, Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.