Life, Physical, and Social Science Technicians, All Other Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($37,310) to the 90th ($101,870). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

With 71,400 jobs nationally, Life, Physical, and Social Science Technicians, All Other make up 0.05% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 10,120 of those jobs, the top three states hold 35.0%, and the deepest concentration sits in Hawaii (location quotient 3.94, 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: $64,560 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($101,870) is 2.7 times the 10th percentile ($37,310), a gap of $64,560 a year. The mean of $64,640 sitting above the median of $60,130 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $75,780, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Life, Physical, and Social Science Technicians, All Other stands number 326 by employment and number 409 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 29% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.9% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 21 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $60,130, 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 5,560 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, College Station-Bryan, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $39,510 a year, against $88,730 in Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA. 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 Life, Physical, and Social Science Technicians, All Other paycheck, gross, is $2,313 every two weeks on an annual $60,130, which is $5,011 a month and $1,156 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($46,270) to the 75th ($77,990) is worth $31,720 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 $66,143 would sit between the median ($60,130) and the 75th percentile ($77,990), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $46,270, is $13,860 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: Epidemiologists, Geological Technicians, Except Hydrologic Technicians, Foresters, Atmospheric and Space Scientists, Materials Scientists, Anthropologists and Archeologists. The full directory is on the Careers hub.