Occupation / job
Microbiologists
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
$87,990 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 76% more, or $18.25 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
Employment as Microbiologists is 18,940 nationally. At that size a large city holds a working market and a small one holds almost none, so where you live changes the number of employers available to you by an order of magnitude.
Life science work suits people who can run a protocol faithfully for months and treat a negative result as information rather than as a wasted season.
How long it takes to become one of the 18,940 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.
Who should not do this
A quarter of the field earns under $67,100 and a quarter over $122,350: $55,250 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 Microbiologists earns $67,100 or more — $17,080 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Three quarters of the field is well paid and the last quarter is still paid better than most of the country.
Avoid it if a career built on renewable funding would be too precarious for your circumstances.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 18,940 figure counts people already working as Microbiologists, 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
From $67,100 to $122,350 at a ratio of 1.8x is wide enough that two people with the same job title have materially different jobs. $87,990 sits in the middle of that and describes neither of them especially well.
Put in money rather than ratios: $67,100 at the 25th percentile, $87,990 at the midpoint, $122,350 at the 75th. $55,250 separates the quarter of Microbiologists at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $122,350, the 75th percentile, is worth $34,360 a year more than the $87,990 midpoint and $55,250 more than the $67,100 a quarter of Microbiologists settle for.
It is $20,890 from $87,990 down to $67,100 but $34,360 up to $122,350. When a range leans this far upward, the interesting question is what puts someone in the top half, because the money is disproportionately there.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Microbiologists is $42.30 an hour. The quarters sit at $32.25 and $58.82, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Microbiologists for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $87,990 describes them.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $87,990 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else