Occupation / job
Animal Breeders
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
Animal Breeders pays $51,130 at the midpoint against $50,020 across all occupations. The headline argues neither for nor against it; the case has to be made on the spread, the entry cost and what the day is actually like.
1,330 people work as Animal Breeders nationally — small enough that a whole metro may hold a handful of positions, so relocation is frequently the price of entry and of every promotion after it.
Agricultural work suits people who accept weather, season and commodity prices as the terms of employment rather than as bad luck.
We carry no verified training length for Animal Breeders — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
Between $44,320 and $62,080 there is $17,760, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
At $44,320, or $21.30 an hour, the bottom quarter of this work lands within $5,700 of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — an unusually solid floor.
Avoid it if seasonal income and weather-dependent work would destabilise your household budget.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 1,330 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $51,130 is a genuinely representative number for Animal Breeders and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $44,320 and $62,080. That is $17,760 of range, with $51,130 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $62,080, the 75th percentile, is worth $10,950 a year more than the $51,130 midpoint and $17,760 more than the $44,320 a quarter of Animal Breeders settle for.
It is $6,810 from $51,130 down to $44,320 but $10,950 up to $62,080. When a range leans this far upward, the interesting question is what puts someone in the top half, because the money is disproportionately there.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $21.30 at the bottom quarter, $24.58 at the midpoint, $29.84 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $51,130 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
The hourly number on this page is $51,130 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Animal Breeders, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else