Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $78,150. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 41,530 people in May 2024, 0.03% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 3,220 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 22.8% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Missouri, whose location quotient of 1.73 says this work is 1.73 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $78,150 at the 25th percentile, $88,180 at the middle, $102,440 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $56,510, a ratio of 1.9 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 California first at 3,220 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $122,470. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologists stands number 421 by employment and number 167 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 24 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $88,180, 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 2,870 jobs, 6.9% 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, Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $79,610 a year, against $112,340 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. 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

The median annual wage of $88,180 works out to $7,348 a month before taxes, $3,392 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,696 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($78,150) to the 75th ($102,440) is worth $24,290 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $96,998 would sit between the median ($88,180) and the 75th percentile ($102,440), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $78,150, is $10,030 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Exercise Physiologists, Neurologists, Dentists, All Other Specialists, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, Orthodontists, Medical Dosimetrists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.