Orthodontists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Orthodontists worker at that point in the distribution, so $239,200 or more at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 5,150, or 0.00% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 670 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.4% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: South Carolina posts a location quotient of 3.68, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $239,200 or more and the mean of $254,620. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 22 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

The state spread for Orthodontists runs from the $223,020 median in Iowa down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (670 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Orthodontists stands number 760 by employment and number 2 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 143% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 0 of the 10 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $239,200 or more, 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 210 jobs, 4.1% 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