Occupational Health and Safety Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Occupational Health and Safety Technicians offer sit among all 31,450 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

BLS counted 31,450 Occupational Health and Safety Technicians jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Alaska, where the location quotient is 2.98, meaning the occupation holds 2.98 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 5,140 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 34.4% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $40,550 or less, and one in ten earns $94,670 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.3 to 1 and the annual gap is $54,120. The mean ($63,800) versus median ($58,440) 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, 49 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $80,270; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Occupational Health and Safety Technicians stands number 472 by employment and number 433 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 31% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.2% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 31 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $58,440, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,900 jobs, 6.0% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 137 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $53,050 a year, against $73,910 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

As a household number, $58,440 a year is $4,870 a month gross, $2,248 every two weeks, $1,124 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($49,510) to the 75th ($74,810) is worth $25,300 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 $4,870 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 $64,284 would sit between the median ($58,440) and the 75th percentile ($74,810), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $49,510, is $8,930 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: Forensic Science Technicians, Psychologists, All Other, Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists, Soil and Plant Scientists, Economists, Food Scientists and Technologists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.