Social Scientists and Related Workers, All Other Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Social Scientists and Related Workers, All Other worker at that point in the distribution, so $127,880 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

BLS counted 36,970 Social Scientists and Related Workers, All Other jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in District of Columbia, where the location quotient is 15.88, meaning the occupation holds 15.88 times its national share of local jobs. Virginia employs the most people outright, 4,390 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 27.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $79,210 at the 25th percentile, $100,340 at the middle, $127,880 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $98,240, a ratio of 2.6 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

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 49 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Virginia at $144,320; the jobs leader is Virginia:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Social Scientists and Related Workers, All Other stands number 442 by employment and number 126 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 19% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.6% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 10 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $100,340, 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 7,050 jobs, 19.1% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Columbus, OH posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $84,330 a year, against $139,230 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Social Scientists and Related Workers, All Other paycheck, gross, is $3,859 every two weeks on an annual $100,340, which is $8,362 a month and $1,930 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($79,210) to the 75th ($127,880) is worth $48,670 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 $110,374 would sit between the median ($100,340) and the 75th percentile ($127,880), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $79,210, is $21,130 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

Sibling occupations in Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations: Clinical and Counseling Psychologists, Life, Physical, and Social Science Technicians, All Other, School Psychologists, Biological Scientists, All Other, Chemical Technicians, Urban and Regional Planners. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.