Occupation / job
Dietitians and Nutritionists
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
How many people are qualified for this, and how many are doing it
The pay figure above only describes people who got the job. This is the part it leaves out.
There are 114,164 people holding the registered dietitian credential (2026). Federal employment records account for 77,570 people working in Dietitians and Nutritionists — 67.9%.
The remainder is a ceiling, not an unemployment rate. Holding the credential is not the same as wanting a job with it, and the remainder also holds everyone who moved into management or teaching, retired without giving the credential up, or works self-employed in a way the employment survey misses. What the pair does establish is that the pay figure above is a survivor's figure, and roughly how many people it is silent about. Everything else that gap contains
Denominator: people holding the registered dietitian credential = 114,164 (Standing count of people holding the credential, CDR registry statistics, retrieved 26 July 2026) · Commission on Dietetic Registration, Registry Statistics · view
Who this suits
At $76,400 against a $50,020 midpoint, Dietitians and Nutritionists pays $26,380 a year more than the typical American job — $12.68 an hour. Nothing pays that much more for free, and the thing it is paid for is what you should be reading about.
77,570 people are employed in this work. Big enough for a real market in every major metro, small enough that experience in Dietitians and Nutritionists is still a distinguishing thing to have.
This work suits people prepared to spend years qualifying for a scope of practice they then hold for the rest of a career, with the accountability that comes attached to it.
We carry no verified training length for Dietitians and Nutritionists — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
A quarter of Dietitians and Nutritionists earn under $63,080 and a quarter over $89,340 — 1.4x, or $26,260 apart. Narrow spreads usually mean a pay schedule, which is stability bought at the price of upside.
Even the bottom quarter of Dietitians and Nutritionists earns $63,080 — $30.32 an hour and $13,060 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Very little of this distribution is badly paid.
Avoid it if the length and cost of the training would be unbearable if you changed your mind halfway.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 77,570 figure counts people already working as Dietitians and Nutritionists, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $76,400 is a genuinely representative number for Dietitians and Nutritionists and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $63,080 and $89,340. That is $26,260 of range, with $76,400 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $63,080 and $89,340 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $76,400. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $12,940; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $26,260.
$13,320 down to $63,080, $12,940 up to $89,340: the midpoint of Dietitians and Nutritionists is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Dietitians and Nutritionists is $36.73 an hour. The quarters sit at $30.32 and $42.95, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Dietitians and Nutritionists for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $76,400 describes them.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $76,400 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else