Occupational Health and Safety Specialists

$90,150 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 80% more, or $19.29 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.

With 140,610 in the occupation, Occupational Health and Safety Specialists is a big field with a visible internal market. Big fields reward moving: the pay you can negotiate on arrival usually beats what the annual review will give you for staying.

Health and safety work suits people who can be the person slowing a job down, repeatedly, and stay steady when the room is annoyed and the schedule is the reason.

How long it takes to become one of the 140,610 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.

A quarter earn below $69,560 and a quarter above $111,690: a 1.6x ratio, $42,130 between the ends. That is an ordinary working spread, which also means experience and location explain most of it and there is no shortcut through the middle.

The bottom quarter of Occupational Health and Safety Specialists earns $69,560 or more — $19,540 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 being unpopular on site would wear on you — the job is regularly to be the reason something stops.

No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 140,610 figure counts people already working as Occupational Health and Safety Specialists, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.

At 1.6x between $69,560 and $111,690 this is a normally shaped occupation. $90,150 is what the middle of Occupational Health and Safety Specialists earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.

In cash terms the middle half of Occupational Health and Safety Specialists runs $69,560 to $111,690 — $42,130 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $90,150.

The 75th percentile is $111,690. Reaching it from the $90,150 midpoint is $21,540 a year; reaching it from the $69,560 that the bottom quarter of Occupational Health and Safety Specialists earn is $42,130.

$90,150 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $20,590 above the bottom quarter, $21,540 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: $33.44 at the bottom quarter, $43.34 at the midpoint, $53.69 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.