Operations Research Analysts Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Operations Research Analysts offer sit among all 107,760 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

The occupation employed 107,760 people in May 2024, 0.07% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 12,240 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 29.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in District of Columbia, whose location quotient of 4.42 says this work is 4.42 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $159,280, which is 3.0 times the $53,910 at the 10th, a difference of $105,370 annually. Because the mean wage ($99,120) sits above the median ($91,290), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Virginia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $123,050, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Operations Research Analysts stands number 259 by employment and number 161 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Computer and Mathematical Occupations, the group median wage is $103,790 across 21 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 12% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.1% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 21 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $91,290, 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

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV is the largest metro employer with 7,610 jobs, 7.1% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Oklahoma City, OK posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $61,840 a year, against $125,900 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $7,608 a month before tax, $3,511 biweekly, $1,756 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($66,910) to the 75th ($124,120) is worth $57,210 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 $100,419 would sit between the median ($91,290) and the 75th percentile ($124,120), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $66,910, is $24,380 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

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