Mathematicians

At $126,710 — $76,690 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Mathematicians 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 2,030 makes this a small field. Small fields are relationship markets: the people already in Mathematicians tend to know who is hiring before the posting exists.

Mathematical science work suits people who are willing to be the person who says the estimate is uncertain, and who can explain why to an audience that wanted a single number.

No verified preparation time is on file for Mathematicians. 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.

A quarter of the field earns under $88,570 and a quarter over $157,020: $68,450 between them, a ratio of 1.8x. 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 $88,570 — $42.58 an hour, $38,550 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Mathematicians is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.

Avoid it if you need your conclusions accepted; a large part of this job is being overruled by someone who preferred a different number.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 2,030 people employed as Mathematicians; 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.

A ratio of 1.8x — $88,570 to $157,020 — is wide enough that specialising inside Mathematicians pays measurably. $126,710 is the middle of a range you can move within.

In cash terms the middle half of Mathematicians runs $88,570 to $157,020 — $68,450 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $126,710.

Getting to $157,020, the 75th percentile, is worth $30,310 a year more than the $126,710 midpoint and $68,450 more than the $88,570 a quarter of Mathematicians settle for.

There is $38,140 between $88,570 and $126,710, and $30,310 between $126,710 and $157,020. The lower half of the range is marginally the longer one — worth knowing if you would be entering Mathematicians at the bottom of it.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $42.58 at the bottom quarter, $60.91 at the midpoint, $75.49 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.