Fire Inspectors and Investigators

Fire Inspectors and Investigators pays $75,920 at the midpoint, 52% above the $50,020 national figure. Premiums that size are rationed by something; find out what before the salary does your thinking for you.

13,800 people work as Fire Inspectors and Investigators. That is enough for a functioning national market and not enough for a functioning local one — in most metros this is a few employers rather than a field you can move around inside.

Firefighting and prevention suit people who function on long shifts in a crew they live with, and who accept that the training volume is high relative to how often it is used.

How long it takes to become one of the 13,800 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.

From $58,690 to $95,120 is $3,035 a month, or 1.6x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.

Even the bottom quarter of Fire Inspectors and Investigators earns $58,690 — $28.21 an hour and $8,670 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Very little of this distribution is badly paid.

Avoid it if the cumulative exposure worries you — the long-run health record of this work is a real part of the decision.

You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 13,800 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.

1.6x between $58,690 and $95,120 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $75,920 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.

The middle half of this field earns between $58,690 and $95,120. That is $36,430 of range, with $75,920 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Getting to $95,120, the 75th percentile, is worth $19,200 a year more than the $75,920 midpoint and $36,430 more than the $58,690 a quarter of Fire Inspectors and Investigators settle for.

$75,920 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $17,230 above the bottom quarter, $19,200 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $36.50 at the midpoint for Fire Inspectors and Investigators, $28.21 at the 25th percentile and $45.73 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.