Occupation / job
Nurse Anesthetists
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 $236,590 — $186,570 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Nurse Anesthetists 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.
51,840 people are employed in this work. Big enough for a real market in every major metro, small enough that experience in Nurse Anesthetists is still a distinguishing thing to have.
Clinical practice suits people who can decide under uncertainty with a patient in front of them, and who are steady about the documentation, the shifts and the liability that come attached.
How long it takes to become one of the 51,840 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
Between $206,730 and $294,350 there is $87,620, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
The bottom quarter of this field earns $206,730 — $99.38 an hour, $156,710 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Nurse Anesthetists is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.
Avoid it if the length and cost of the training would be unbearable if you changed your mind halfway.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 51,840 figure counts people already working as Nurse Anesthetists, 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
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $236,590 is a genuinely representative number for Nurse Anesthetists and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $206,730 and $294,350. That is $87,620 of range, with $236,590 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $206,730 and $294,350 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $236,590. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $57,760; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $87,620.
From $236,590 the drop to $206,730 is $29,860 and the climb to $294,350 is $57,760. 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.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Nurse Anesthetists is $113.74 an hour. The quarters sit at $99.38 and $141.51, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Nurse Anesthetists. The self-employed are excluded, so $236,590 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $236,590 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