Occupation / job
Detectives and Criminal Investigators
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
$93,790 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 88% more, or $21.04 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
114,430 people are employed as Detectives and Criminal Investigators. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.
Law enforcement suits people who can be the visible authority in a hostile moment and then write it up accurately afterwards, knowing the record will be read adversarially.
How long it takes to become one of the 114,430 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
$51,190 separates the bottom quarter of Detectives and Criminal Investigators at $69,330 from the top quarter at $120,520. At a 1.7x ratio the midpoint is a weak guide to your own first year — find out which end you would be entering at.
Even the bottom quarter of Detectives and Criminal Investigators earns $69,330 — $33.33 an hour and $19,310 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Very little of this distribution is badly paid.
Avoid it if you could not accept that your worst thirty seconds may be reviewed for years afterwards.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 114,430 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
A ratio of 1.7x — $69,330 to $120,520 — is wide enough that specialising inside Detectives and Criminal Investigators pays measurably. $93,790 is the middle of a range you can move within.
In cash terms the middle half of Detectives and Criminal Investigators runs $69,330 to $120,520 — $51,190 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $93,790.
Getting to $120,520, the 75th percentile, is worth $26,730 a year more than the $93,790 midpoint and $51,190 more than the $69,330 a quarter of Detectives and Criminal Investigators settle for.
$93,790 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $24,460 above the bottom quarter, $26,730 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Detectives and Criminal Investigators is $45.09 an hour. The quarters sit at $33.33 and $57.94, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Detectives and Criminal Investigators. The self-employed are excluded, so $93,790 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Detectives and Criminal Investigators, the hourly figure is $93,790 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