Medical Transcriptionists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Medical Transcriptionists offer sit among all 43,070 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

May 2024 employment stood at 43,070, or 0.03% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 5,630 jobs; the top three states sum to 32.7% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: South Dakota posts a location quotient of 2.78, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $27,520 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($53,890) is 2.0 times the 10th percentile ($26,370), a gap of $27,520 a year. The mean of $39,210 sitting above the median of $37,550 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 5,630 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Minnesota would lead at $52,190. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Medical Transcriptionists stands number 412 by employment and number 749 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Support Occupations, the group median wage is $41,590 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 26 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $37,550, 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 3,790 jobs, 8.8% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 161 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, San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $27,130 a year, against $51,360 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,129 a month before tax, $1,444 biweekly, $722 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($31,200) to the 75th ($45,680) is worth $14,480 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 $41,305 would sit between the median ($37,550) and the 75th percentile ($45,680), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $31,200, is $6,350 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 Support Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Medical Assistants, Dental Assistants, Phlebotomists, Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers, Physical Therapist Assistants, Healthcare Support Workers, All Other. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.