Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric

At $300,080 — $250,060 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric 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.

Nationally 8,950 people do this. That is a real occupation with a thin local presence — enough that Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric is a career, not enough that you can assume a second employer down the road.

This work suits people prepared to spend years qualifying for a scope of practice they then hold for the rest of a career, with the accountability that comes attached to it.

How long it takes to become one of the 8,950 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 middle half of Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric spans $173,650 to $421,530, which is 2.4x and $20,656 a month. Ask what puts someone at the top of a range like this before assuming time served does it, because usually it does not.

The 25th percentile is $173,650, $123,630 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.

Avoid it if you could not carry clinical responsibility for an outcome that goes badly through nobody’s fault.

No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 8,950 figure counts people already working as Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.

2.4x is a very wide spread. In occupations shaped like this the useful question is not what Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric pays but what the well-paid version of it is, because $421,530 and $173,650 are reached by different routes.

The middle half of this field earns between $173,650 and $421,530. That is $247,880 of range, with $300,080 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Between $173,650 and $421,530 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $300,080. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $121,450; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $247,880.

$126,430 down to $173,650, $121,450 up to $421,530: the midpoint of Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $144.26 at the midpoint for Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric, $83.48 at the 25th percentile and $202.65 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.