Physicists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Physicists worker at that point in the distribution, so $210,260 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 21,340, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 6,220 jobs; the top three states sum to 43.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: New Mexico posts a location quotient of 6.48, 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 $166,290 and the mean of $166,000. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 40 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Minnesota posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $222,550, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Physicists stands number 543 by employment and number 28 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 98% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.5% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 17 of the 40 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $166,290, 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 1,940 jobs, 9.1% 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, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $129,980 a year, against $187,560 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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: $13,858 a month before tax, $6,396 biweekly, $3,198 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($117,450) to the 75th ($210,260) is worth $92,810 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 $182,919 would sit between the median ($166,290) and the 75th percentile ($210,260), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $117,450, is $48,840 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: Chemical Technicians, Urban and Regional Planners, Environmental Science and Protection Technicians, Including Health, Social Scientists and Related Workers, All Other, Biochemists and Biophysicists, Social Science Research Assistants. The full directory is on the Careers hub.