Occupation / job
Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance
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
With a $50,340 median against a $50,020 national one, Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance is an average-paying occupation by construction — $26 a month either way. What separates it from the alternatives is not on this line.
National employment is 202,810. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.
Scheduling, dispatch and material recording suit people who can hold a moving picture of where everything is and re-plan it the moment one piece slips.
How long it takes to become one of the 202,810 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 $42,750 and $62,450 there is $19,700, a ratio of 1.5x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
Even the bottom quarter, under $42,750, lands within $7,270 of the $50,020 typical American wage. The downside of Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance is not really the money.
Avoid it if you need to finish a task before starting the next; that is not how this desk works.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 202,810 people employed as Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance; 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
$42,750 to $62,450 is a 1.5x range. Ranges this tight usually mean the employer set is homogeneous — the same kind of organisation paying the same kind of scale — so the lever you have is geography rather than employer.
Put in money rather than ratios: $42,750 at the 25th percentile, $50,340 at the midpoint, $62,450 at the 75th. $19,700 separates the quarter of Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $62,450, the 75th percentile, is worth $12,110 a year more than the $50,340 midpoint and $19,700 more than the $42,750 a quarter of Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance settle for.
It is $7,590 from $50,340 down to $42,750 but $12,110 up to $62,450. 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: $20.55 at the bottom quarter, $24.20 at the midpoint, $30.02 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
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $50,340 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance, the hourly figure is $50,340 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