Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists worker at that point in the distribution, so $133,870 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

The occupation employed 156,300 people in May 2024, 0.10% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 24,190 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 33.1% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Massachusetts, whose location quotient of 4.38 says this work is 4.38 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $168,210, which is 2.7 times the $61,860 at the 10th, a difference of $106,350 annually. Because the mean wage ($112,690) sits above the median ($100,590), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $131,430; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists stands number 193 by employment and number 125 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% more than its group median, and it supplies 10.8% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 12 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $100,590, 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

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH is the largest metro employer with 15,330 jobs, 9.8% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 175 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Birmingham, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $70,060 a year, against $150,850 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $100,590 a year is $8,382 a month gross, $3,869 every two weeks, $1,934 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($77,260) to the 75th ($133,870) is worth $56,610 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 $8,382 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 $110,649 would sit between the median ($100,590) and the 75th percentile ($133,870), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $77,260, is $23,330 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: Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers, Physicists, Microbiologists, Forensic Science Technicians, 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.