Occupational Health and Safety Specialists 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 Occupational Health and Safety Specialists ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $64,410. 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 128,430 people in May 2024, 0.08% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 17,180 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 29.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Wyoming, whose location quotient of 2.23 says this work is 2.23 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $50,610 or less, and one in ten earns $130,460 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.6 to 1 and the annual gap is $79,850. The mean ($88,660) versus median ($83,910) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $115,710, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Occupational Health and Safety Specialists stands number 231 by employment and number 188 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 0% less than its group median, and it supplies 8.9% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $83,910, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 5,600 jobs, 4.4% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $50,290 a year, against $139,860 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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

As a household number, $83,910 a year is $6,992 a month gross, $3,227 every two weeks, $1,614 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($64,410) to the 75th ($105,390) is worth $40,980 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 $6,992 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 $92,301 would sit between the median ($83,910) and the 75th percentile ($105,390), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $64,410, is $19,500 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Conservation Scientists, Physical Scientists, All Other, Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers, Physicists, Microbiologists, Forensic Science Technicians. The full directory is on the Careers hub.