Occupation / job
Insurance Underwriters
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 $81,370 against a $50,020 national midpoint, Insurance Underwriters pays 63% more than the typical American job — $31,350 a year of difference. Read the entry requirements before the number.
With 105,420 in the occupation, Insurance Underwriters is a big field with a visible internal market. Big fields reward moving: the pay you can negotiate on arrival usually beats what the annual review will give you for staying.
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 Insurance Underwriters. 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
The quarters sit at $64,620 and $110,390 — 1.7x, or $3,814 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.
Even the bottom quarter of Insurance Underwriters earns $64,620 — $31.06 an hour and $14,600 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Very little of this distribution is badly paid.
Avoid it if repetitive detail work drains you; the quarter-end and year-end cycles are non-negotiable and immovable.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 105,420 people employed as Insurance Underwriters; 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
At 1.7x, the distribution for Insurance Underwriters is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $64,620 to $110,390 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.
The middle half of this field earns between $64,620 and $110,390. That is $45,770 of range, with $81,370 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $110,390. Reaching it from the $81,370 midpoint is $29,020 a year; reaching it from the $64,620 that the bottom quarter of Insurance Underwriters earn is $45,770.
The distance from the midpoint up to $110,390 is $29,020 — well over the $16,750 down to $64,620. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Insurance Underwriters earns, and half the field is in that upper half.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Insurance Underwriters is $39.12 an hour. The quarters sit at $31.06 and $53.07, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $81,370 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.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Insurance Underwriters, the hourly figure is $81,370 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