Occupation / job
Economists
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 $124,720 — $74,700 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Economists sits at the top of what BLS publishes. Read the gate before the figure: at this level there is always one, and it is usually measured in years.
Nationally 17,790 people do this. That is a real occupation with a thin local presence — enough that Economists is a career, not enough that you can assume a second employer down the road.
This work suits people who can hold a research question steady through the years it takes to answer, and who are comfortable that the answer may be politically inconvenient.
How long it takes to become one of the 17,790 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
At 2.0x, from $89,330 to $174,720, the two halves of Economists are not really doing the same job. $7,115 a month separates them, and something other than the title explains it.
The 25th percentile is $89,330, $39,310 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.
Avoid it if you would find it hard to publish a finding that a funder, a discipline or the public did not want.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 17,790 figure counts people already working as Economists, 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
At 2.0x the range from $89,330 to $174,720 is doing more explaining than the job title is. Something sorts people across that distance — sector, speciality, or who employs them — and finding out what it is matters more than the $124,720 midpoint.
Put in money rather than ratios: $89,330 at the 25th percentile, $124,720 at the midpoint, $174,720 at the 75th. $85,390 separates the quarter of Economists at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $174,720, the 75th percentile, is worth $50,000 a year more than the $124,720 midpoint and $85,390 more than the $89,330 a quarter of Economists settle for.
The climb from $124,720 to $174,720 is $50,000, against $35,390 down to $89,330. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Economists is larger than the realistic downside.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Economists is $59.96 an hour. The quarters sit at $42.94 and $84.00, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $124,720 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
The hourly number on this page is $124,720 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Economists, 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