Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers offer sit among all 22,510 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 22,510 Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Alaska, where the location quotient is 7.90, meaning the occupation holds 7.90 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 3,620 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 36.4% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $72,440 at the 25th percentile, $99,240 at the middle, $134,350 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $120,090, a ratio of 3.0 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 3,620 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Texas would lead at $155,330. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers stands number 536 by employment and number 131 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 18% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.6% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 11 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $99,240, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,760 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, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $93,820 a year, against $176,870 in Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $8,270 a month before tax, $3,817 biweekly, $1,908 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($72,440) to the 75th ($134,350) is worth $61,910 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 $109,164 would sit between the median ($99,240) and the 75th percentile ($134,350), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $72,440, is $26,800 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: Biochemists and Biophysicists, Social Science Research Assistants, Occupational Health and Safety Technicians, Forest and Conservation Technicians, Conservation Scientists, Physical Scientists, All Other. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.