Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers worker at that point in the distribution, so $44,550 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 114,190 people in May 2024, 0.07% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 14,960 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 26.3% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Oregon, whose location quotient of 1.84 says this work is 1.84 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $34,320 at the 25th percentile, $37,320 at the middle, $44,550 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $18,990, a ratio of 1.7 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 Rhode Island at $48,050; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers stands number 244 by employment and number 753 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Support Occupations, the group median wage is $41,590 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.5% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 15 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $37,320, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 4,610 jobs, 4.0% 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, Tulsa, OK posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $32,390 a year, against $51,710 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

The median annual wage of $37,320 works out to $3,110 a month before taxes, $1,435 per biweekly paycheck, and $718 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($34,320) to the 75th ($44,550) is worth $10,230 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 $41,052 would sit between the median ($37,320) and the 75th percentile ($44,550), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $34,320, is $3,000 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 Support Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Support Occupations: Dental Assistants, Phlebotomists, Physical Therapist Assistants, Healthcare Support Workers, All Other, Massage Therapists, Medical Equipment Preparers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.