Occupation / job
Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses
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
A $64,400 midpoint puts Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses $14,380 above the $50,020 typical American job — a 29% premium paid for the training, the licence or the conditions. It is not free money and it disappears the moment you stop meeting the requirement.
648,410 people do this work. An occupation this large has a published, well-known going rate — which means less scope to be underpaid and less scope to negotiate above it.
Health technologist roles suit people who want clinical responsibility with a defined scope — a real technical skill, exercised on patients, without the open-ended liability of the diagnosing role.
No verified preparation time is on file for Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses. 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 Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses earn under $59,000 and a quarter over $76,030: 1.3x, and $17,030 between the ends. That is a narrow band — enough room to be paid better than average, not enough for the occupation to be a route to a materially different income.
Even the bottom quarter of Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses earns $59,000 — $28.36 an hour and $8,980 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Very little of this distribution is badly paid.
Avoid it if you would find a narrow, protocol-bound scope confining — the boundary of the role is set by regulation, not by your competence.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 648,410 figure counts people already working as Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses, 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 1.3x ratio from $59,000 to $76,030 makes $64,400 a dependable planning number. Dependable is the whole offer here — there is not much room above it.
Put in money rather than ratios: $59,000 at the 25th percentile, $64,400 at the midpoint, $76,030 at the 75th. $17,030 separates the quarter of Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $76,030. Reaching it from the $64,400 midpoint is $11,630 a year; reaching it from the $59,000 that the bottom quarter of Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses earn is $17,030.
From $64,400 the drop to $59,000 is $5,400 and the climb to $76,030 is $11,630. When the upper half of the range is that much longer, the average is pulled well above the median — which is exactly why this site publishes the median.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $30.96 at the midpoint for Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses, $28.36 at the 25th percentile and $36.55 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $64,400 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 Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses, the hourly figure is $64,400 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