Psychologists, All Other

The $110,840 midpoint is $5,068 a month above the $50,020 typical American job, which puts Psychologists, All Other near the ceiling of published federal wage data. Everything at this level is gated, and the gate is usually years long.

Employment as Psychologists, All Other is 18,820 nationally. At that size a large city holds a working market and a small one holds almost none, so where you live changes the number of employers available to you by an order of magnitude.

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.

How long it takes to become one of the 18,820 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 under $68,850, a quarter over $147,240: $6,532 a month between them at a 2.1x ratio. Planning around the midpoint of a spread this wide is planning around a number very few people in Psychologists, All Other actually earn.

The bottom quarter of Psychologists, All Other earns $68,850 or more — $18,830 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 you would find it hard to publish a finding that a funder, a discipline or the public did not want.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 18,820 people employed as Psychologists, All Other; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.

At 2.1x the range from $68,850 to $147,240 is doing more explaining than the job title is. Something sorts people across that distance — sector, speciality, or who employs them — and finding out what it is matters more than the $110,840 midpoint.

In cash terms the middle half of Psychologists, All Other runs $68,850 to $147,240 — $78,390 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $110,840.

The 75th percentile is $147,240. Reaching it from the $110,840 midpoint is $36,400 a year; reaching it from the $68,850 that the bottom quarter of Psychologists, All Other earn is $78,390.

The fall from $110,840 to the $68,850 bottom quarter is $41,990; the climb to the $147,240 top quarter is $36,400. Slightly more of the range lies below the midpoint than above it, so the downside is the bigger movement here.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $53.28 at the midpoint for Psychologists, All Other, $33.10 at the 25th percentile and $70.78 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.