School Psychologists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the School Psychologists worker at that point in the distribution, so $108,210 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 63,830, or 0.04% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 9,350 jobs; the top three states sum to 34.1% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: New York posts a location quotient of 1.84, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $71,440 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($132,320) is 2.2 times the 10th percentile ($60,880), a gap of $71,440 a year. The mean of $93,610 sitting above the median of $86,930 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $118,310, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, School Psychologists stands number 347 by employment and number 173 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 3% more than its group median, and it supplies 4.4% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 15 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $86,930, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 6,180 jobs, 9.7% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Rochester, NY posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $76,550 a year, against $129,140 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $86,930 a year is $7,244 a month gross, $3,343 every two weeks, $1,672 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($73,240) to the 75th ($108,210) is worth $34,970 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 $7,244 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 $95,623 would sit between the median ($86,930) and the 75th percentile ($108,210), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $73,240, is $13,690 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: Forensic Science Technicians, Psychologists, All Other, Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists, Soil and Plant Scientists, Economists, Food Scientists and Technologists. The full directory is on the Careers hub.