Nurse Anesthetists 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 Nurse Anesthetists ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $187,110. 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

BLS counted 50,350 Nurse Anesthetists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.03% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in West Virginia, where the location quotient is 3.45, meaning the occupation holds 3.45 times its national share of local jobs. Florida employs the most people outright, 6,140 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 25.3% of the national total.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $223,210 and the mean of $231,700. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 47 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 47 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Delaware at $236,800; the jobs leader is Florida:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Nurse Anesthetists stands number 388 by employment and number 22 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 127% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 14 of the 33 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $223,210, 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

Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI is the largest metro employer with 1,700 jobs, 3.4% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 136 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, $156,490 a year, against $265,960 in Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL. 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: $18,601 a month before tax, $8,585 biweekly, $4,292 weekly. The top of this ladder is top-coded by BLS (shown as $239,200+), so the full experience premium cannot be printed from the published table; the 25th percentile, $187,110, is the firmest anchor for an early-career offer. 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.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Workers, All Other, Emergency Medicine Physicians, Healthcare Diagnosing or Treating Practitioners, All Other, Dietetic Technicians, Athletic Trainers, Radiologists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.