Occupation / job
Financial Risk Specialists
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 $117,330 — $67,310 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Financial Risk Specialists 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.
63,850 people are employed as Financial Risk Specialists. At that scale every large metro has a real market, and the difference between a good year and a bad one is usually which employer you are at rather than whether anyone is hiring.
Financial specialist work suits people who are precise about other people’s money and unbothered that the calendar, not the workload, decides when the pressure arrives.
No verified preparation time is on file for Financial Risk Specialists. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
A quarter of the field earns under $83,980 and a quarter over $158,250: $74,270 between them, a ratio of 1.9x. Wide enough that the first offer you get tells you more about your prospects than the median does.
The bottom quarter of this field earns $83,980 — $40.37 an hour, $33,960 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Financial Risk Specialists is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.
Avoid it if repetitive detail work drains you; the quarter-end and year-end cycles are non-negotiable and immovable.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 63,850 figure counts people already working as Financial Risk Specialists, 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
A ratio of 1.9x — $83,980 to $158,250 — is wide enough that specialising inside Financial Risk Specialists pays measurably. $117,330 is the middle of a range you can move within.
The middle half of this field earns between $83,980 and $158,250. That is $74,270 of range, with $117,330 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $158,250, the 75th percentile, is worth $40,920 a year more than the $117,330 midpoint and $74,270 more than the $83,980 a quarter of Financial Risk Specialists settle for.
From $117,330 it is $33,350 down to the bottom quarter and $40,920 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Financial Risk Specialists is $56.40 an hour. The quarters sit at $40.37 and $76.08, 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 Financial Risk Specialists for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $117,330 describes them.
The hourly number on this page is $117,330 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Financial Risk Specialists, 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