Occupation / job
Chemists
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
$91,240 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 82% more, or $19.81 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
Employment stands at 82,770. Chemists is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
Physical science suits people who are content that the instrument, the sample and the funding cycle set the pace, and who find the method satisfying independent of the finding.
No verified preparation time is on file for Chemists. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
A quarter of the field earns under $69,460 and a quarter over $125,550: $56,090 between them, a ratio of 1.8x. Wide enough that the first offer you get tells you more about your prospects than the median does.
Even the bottom quarter of Chemists earns $69,460 — $33.39 an hour and $19,440 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Very little of this distribution is badly paid.
Avoid it if your household cannot absorb the geography — the instruments and the posts are in a small number of places.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 82,770 people employed as Chemists; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
At 1.8x, the distribution for Chemists is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $69,460 to $125,550 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.
In cash terms the middle half of Chemists runs $69,460 to $125,550 — $56,090 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $91,240.
The 75th percentile is $125,550. Reaching it from the $91,240 midpoint is $34,310 a year; reaching it from the $69,460 that the bottom quarter of Chemists earn is $56,090.
It is $21,780 from $91,240 down to $69,460 but $34,310 up to $125,550. 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: $33.39 at the bottom quarter, $43.86 at the midpoint, $60.36 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Chemists. The self-employed are excluded, so $91,240 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Chemists, the hourly figure is $91,240 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else