Veterinarians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Veterinarians ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $98,420. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 80,630 Veterinarians jobs in May 2024, which is 0.05% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Vermont, where the location quotient is 2.14, meaning the occupation holds 2.14 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 8,510 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 24.7% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $98,420 at the 25th percentile, $125,510 at the middle, $161,610 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $142,540, a ratio of 3.0 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $158,950; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Veterinarians stands number 303 by employment and number 63 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 28% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 17 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $125,510, 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 2,930 jobs, 3.6% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 288 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, Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $126,250 a year, against $193,660 in Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ. 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 annual wage of $125,510 works out to $10,459 a month before taxes, $4,827 per biweekly paycheck, and $2,414 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($98,420) to the 75th ($161,610) is worth $63,190 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $138,061 would sit between the median ($125,510) and the 75th percentile ($161,610), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $98,420, is $27,090 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: Physicians, Pathologists, Hearing Aid Specialists, Dermatologists, Orthotists and Prosthetists, Podiatrists, Acupuncturists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.