Nursing Assistants

At $42,260 against $50,020, this pays $646 a month less than the typical American job. Below the midpoint but within reach of it: the spread and the floor below decide whether that description flatters Nursing Assistants or not.

1,448,910 people are employed as Nursing Assistants, which puts it among the largest occupations in the United States. At this scale you are never short of a vacancy and never scarce, and the second fact is why the first one is cheap.

Aide and nursing assistant work suits people who can do physically heavy, intimate care with patience, and who understand that the relationship with the patient is most of what the job actually is.

How long it takes to become one of the 1,448,910 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.

The quarters sit at $37,260 and $47,220, $830 a month apart at a ratio of 1.3x. Narrow enough that what you can expect is close to what everyone else gets.

The 25th percentile is $37,260 — $17.91 an hour, and $12,760 below the $50,020 typical American job. Entry-level in this field means that number, not the midpoint, so budget against it.

Avoid it if your back or knees are already a concern — the lifting is real and it does not become someone else’s job with seniority.

No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 1,448,910 figure counts people already working as Nursing Assistants, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.

At 1.3x between $37,260 and $47,220, this is a narrow distribution. $42,260 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.

Put in money rather than ratios: $37,260 at the 25th percentile, $42,260 at the midpoint, $47,220 at the 75th. $9,960 separates the quarter of Nursing Assistants at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Getting to $47,220, the 75th percentile, is worth $4,960 a year more than the $42,260 midpoint and $9,960 more than the $37,260 a quarter of Nursing Assistants settle for.

$42,260 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $5,000 above the bottom quarter, $4,960 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $17.91 at the bottom quarter, $20.31 at the midpoint, $22.70 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.