Psychiatrists

At $281,870 — $231,850 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Psychiatrists 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.

27,980 people do this work nationally. That is the size at which Psychiatrists becomes a career rather than a post — enough employers in a normal city that leaving one of them is a decision rather than a crisis.

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 27,980 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.

From under $154,150 to over $362,740 — $208,590 between the quarters, a 2.4x ratio. A range that wide is not one job with variation in it; it is a label covering several different jobs, and the entry-level version is the one you should cost.

Even at the 25th percentile Psychiatrists pays $154,150, $104,130 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Almost the entire distribution sits above the typical American wage, which is rare and worth weighing against the entry cost.

Avoid it if you cannot do nights, cannot carry medico-legal exposure, or need to be finished thinking about work when the shift ends.

No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 27,980 figure counts people already working as Psychiatrists, 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 Psychiatrists pays but what the well-paid version of it is, because $362,740 and $154,150 are reached by different routes.

In cash terms the middle half of Psychiatrists runs $154,150 to $362,740 — $208,590 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $281,870.

Getting to $362,740, the 75th percentile, is worth $80,870 a year more than the $281,870 midpoint and $208,590 more than the $154,150 a quarter of Psychiatrists settle for.

The midpoint sits high inside its own range: $127,720 above the $154,150 bottom quarter but only $80,870 below the $362,740 top quarter. Most of the distance in Psychiatrists is spent climbing out of the bottom, and once you are past the middle there is not much further to go.

On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Psychiatrists is $135.51 an hour. The quarters sit at $74.11 and $174.39, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.