Materials Scientists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Materials Scientists worker at that point in the distribution, so $134,140 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

With 8,330 jobs nationally, Materials Scientists make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Massachusetts alone holds 720 of those jobs, the top three states hold 24.2%, and the deepest concentration sits in Delaware (location quotient 3.76, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $61,460 or less, and one in ten earns $168,500 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.7 to 1 and the annual gap is $107,040. The mean ($111,410) versus median ($104,160) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 31 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New Hampshire at $136,300; the jobs leader is Massachusetts:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Materials Scientists stands number 709 by employment and number 101 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 24% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 14 of the 30 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $104,160, 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 790 jobs, 9.5% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $112,100 a year, against $122,480 in Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $104,160 a year is $8,680 a month gross, $4,006 every two weeks, $2,003 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($79,980) to the 75th ($134,140) is worth $54,160 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 $8,680 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 $114,576 would sit between the median ($104,160) and the 75th percentile ($134,140), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $79,980, is $24,180 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: Social Scientists and Related Workers, All Other, Biochemists and Biophysicists, Social Science Research Assistants, Occupational Health and Safety Technicians, Forest and Conservation Technicians, Conservation Scientists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.