Occupation / job
Industrial-Organizational Psychologists
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 $193,950 — $143,930 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Industrial-Organizational Psychologists 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.
National employment of 790 makes Industrial-Organizational Psychologists a rare job rather than an uncommon one. Expect to move for the first post and to move again for the second, because waiting for a local vacancy can mean waiting years.
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.
No verified preparation time is on file for Industrial-Organizational Psychologists. 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 earn under $107,310, a quarter over $222,280: $9,580 a month between them at a 2.1x ratio. Planning around the midpoint of a spread this wide is planning around a number very few people in Industrial-Organizational Psychologists actually earn.
Even at the 25th percentile Industrial-Organizational Psychologists pays $107,310, $57,290 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Almost the entire distribution sits above the typical American wage, which is rare and worth weighing against the entry cost.
Avoid it if you need your field to be treated as settled; much of this work is contested in public.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 790 figure counts people already working as Industrial-Organizational Psychologists, 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 2.1x ratio says the label covers materially different work. Somewhere between $107,310 and $222,280, employer type, sub-speciality or credential is doing the sorting that the job title is not.
The middle half of this field earns between $107,310 and $222,280. That is $114,970 of range, with $193,950 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $107,310 and $222,280 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $193,950. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $28,330; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $114,970.
The midpoint sits high inside its own range: $86,640 above the $107,310 bottom quarter but only $28,330 below the $222,280 top quarter. Most of the distance in Industrial-Organizational Psychologists is spent climbing out of the bottom, and once you are past the middle there is not much further to go.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $51.59 at the bottom quarter, $93.24 at the midpoint, $106.86 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Industrial-Organizational Psychologists. The self-employed are excluded, so $193,950 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Industrial-Organizational Psychologists, the hourly figure is $193,950 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