Political Scientists

The $142,080 midpoint is $7,671 a month above the $50,020 typical American job, which puts Political Scientists near the ceiling of published federal wage data. Everything at this level is gated, and the gate is usually years long.

National employment of 5,540 makes this a small field. Small fields are relationship markets: the people already in Political Scientists tend to know who is hiring before the posting exists.

Social science suits people who can study human behaviour without needing the answer to be flattering, and who can defend a method to people who dislike the conclusion.

We carry no verified training length for Political Scientists — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.

A quarter earn below $114,030 and a quarter above $174,180: a 1.5x ratio, $60,150 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 25th percentile is $114,030, $64,010 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 would find it hard to publish a finding that a funder, a discipline or the public did not want.

You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 5,540 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.

At 1.5x between $114,030 and $174,180 this is a normally shaped occupation. $142,080 is what the middle of Political Scientists earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.

The middle half of this field earns between $114,030 and $174,180. That is $60,150 of range, with $142,080 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Between $114,030 and $174,180 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $142,080. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $32,100; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $60,150.

$142,080 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $28,050 above the bottom quarter, $32,100 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.

On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Political Scientists is $68.30 an hour. The quarters sit at $54.82 and $83.74, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.