Occupation / job
Dietetic Technicians
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
At a $37,640 midpoint, Dietetic Technicians sits 25% under the $50,020 national figure. The shortfall is $1,031 a month, which is roughly the size of a rent difference between metros — worth checking before the job is the thing you blame.
At 31,560 employed, this is a mid-sized occupation. In a normal city that means several possible employers and a genuine market rate, which is the point at which knowing the numbers on this page starts to be worth money.
Health technologist roles suit people who want clinical responsibility with a defined scope — a real technical skill, exercised on patients, without the open-ended liability of the diagnosing role.
How long it takes to become one of the 31,560 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
Between $33,880 and $45,750 there is $11,870, 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.
Under $33,880 is where a quarter of this field sits, $16,140 beneath the $50,020 a typical American job pays. The risk in Dietetic Technicians is not the average outcome, it is how long you might spend in the bottom quarter before leaving it.
Avoid it if you would find a narrow, protocol-bound scope confining — the boundary of the role is set by regulation, not by your competence.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 31,560 people employed as Dietetic Technicians; 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
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $37,640 is a genuinely representative number for Dietetic Technicians and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $33,880 and $45,750. That is $11,870 of range, with $37,640 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $45,750. Reaching it from the $37,640 midpoint is $8,110 a year; reaching it from the $33,880 that the bottom quarter of Dietetic Technicians earn is $11,870.
From $37,640 the drop to $33,880 is $3,760 and the climb to $45,750 is $8,110. When the upper half of the range is that much longer, the average is pulled well above the median — which is exactly why this site publishes the median.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Dietetic Technicians is $18.09 an hour. The quarters sit at $16.28 and $21.99, 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 Dietetic Technicians. The self-employed are excluded, so $37,640 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $37,640 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Dietetic Technicians, 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