Optometrists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($70,060) to the 90th ($203,210). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

With 41,890 jobs nationally, Optometrists make up 0.03% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 6,790 of those jobs, the top three states hold 29.8%, and the deepest concentration sits in Rhode Island (location quotient 1.67, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $133,150 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($203,210) is 2.9 times the 10th percentile ($70,060), a gap of $133,150 a year. The mean of $140,940 sitting above the median of $134,830 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Alaska at $165,830; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Optometrists stands number 417 by employment and number 50 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 37% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 21 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $134,830, 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 2,720 jobs, 6.5% 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, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $111,420 a year, against $169,880 in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX. 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

As a household number, $134,830 a year is $11,236 a month gross, $5,186 every two weeks, $2,593 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($103,310) to the 75th ($163,710) is worth $60,400 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 $11,236 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 $148,313 would sit between the median ($134,830) and the 75th percentile ($163,710), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $103,310, is $31,520 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 Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: Psychiatric Technicians, Veterinary Technologists and Technicians, Surgical Technologists, Dentists, General, Family Medicine Physicians, Paramedics. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.