Social Science Research Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Social Science Research Assistants worker at that point in the distribution, so $73,060 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

The occupation employed 32,940 people in May 2024, 0.02% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 5,610 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 36.6% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in District of Columbia, whose location quotient of 11.50 says this work is 11.50 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $46,190 at the 25th percentile, $58,040 at the middle, $73,060 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $64,210, a ratio of 2.8 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 5,610 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Ohio would lead at $70,670. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Social Science Research Assistants stands number 466 by employment and number 440 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 31% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.3% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 11 of the 40 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $58,040, 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 2,470 jobs, 7.5% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 76 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $59,330 a year, against $84,670 in Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Social Science Research Assistants paycheck, gross, is $2,232 every two weeks on an annual $58,040, which is $4,837 a month and $1,116 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($46,190) to the 75th ($73,060) is worth $26,870 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $63,844 would sit between the median ($58,040) and the 75th percentile ($73,060), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $46,190, is $11,850 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Environmental Scientists and Specialists, Including Health, Chemists, Biological Technicians, Clinical and Counseling Psychologists, Life, Physical, and Social Science Technicians, All Other, School Psychologists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.