Chemical Technicians
What the pay figures show
- Louisiana pays chemical technicians the most, at $85,850. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $75,880 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Louisiana leads for chemical technicians at $85,850 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $75,880 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$60,390
People doing it
57,540
Highest paid
$85,850
LA
Best off, really
$75,880
LA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$41,740
Highest tenth
$92,040
Lowest, really
$38,281
MD
States with data
51
National average
$63,900
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.34%
LA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $38,281 to $75,880. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- This is a small job: about 57,540 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $60,390. Nothing is missing.
- Geographic dispersion in chemical technicians is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $38,281 through $75,880. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- With 57,540 workers, chemical technicians is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- Coverage for chemical technicians is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Chemical Technicians
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $41,740 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $60,390 |
| Top tenth earn over | $92,040 |
| This salary | $60,390 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Chemical Technicians
The national median for this job
$60,390around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $41,740 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $60,390 |
| Top tenth | $92,040 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Chemical Technicians, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $45,230 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Louisiana · $85,850 |
| Spread | $40,620 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $62,580 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $64,399 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| LA | $85,850 | $67,036 | $75,880 |
| AK | $79,380 | $64,674 | $63,583 |
| SC | $75,020 | $58,948 | $63,265 |
| DE | $78,620 | $60,181 | $60,634 |
| MO | $68,550 | $54,770 | $59,687 |
| NE | $62,640 | $50,365 | $55,728 |
| ND | $57,760 | $48,590 | $54,860 |
| OK | $60,020 | $48,206 | $54,602 |
| VT | $65,560 | $52,641 | $54,474 |
| KY | $60,830 | $49,045 | $54,213 |
| TX | $62,580 | $52,463 | $53,988 |
| KS | $61,560 | $48,497 | $53,906 |
| OH | $59,750 | $49,262 | $53,656 |
| AZ | $65,860 | $53,855 | $53,266 |
| IA | $58,090 | $47,260 | $53,240 |
| NV | $61,520 | $51,611 | $53,219 |
| WV | $58,750 | $47,572 | $52,992 |
| WY | $56,320 | $47,433 | $52,212 |
| IN | $59,290 | $48,100 | $52,178 |
| AL | $58,150 | $46,401 | $51,574 |
| WI | $59,440 | $47,863 | $51,412 |
| NC | $59,030 | $47,764 | $50,738 |
| CO | $63,770 | $51,322 | $50,622 |
| MN | $62,400 | $49,599 | $50,396 |
| MS | $54,580 | $43,944 | $50,341 |
| TN | $54,840 | $46,244 | $49,985 |
| NM | $55,120 | $45,044 | $49,835 |
| MI | $58,180 | $46,706 | $49,590 |
| IL | $61,890 | $48,990 | $49,557 |
| PA | $59,420 | $48,100 | $49,333 |
| MA | $67,570 | $53,307 | $49,250 |
| RI | $61,680 | $49,847 | $49,153 |
| GA | $58,120 | $46,578 | $48,168 |
| ID | $54,560 | $43,981 | $48,106 |
| WA | $62,100 | $52,077 | $47,970 |
| MT | $52,890 | $42,948 | $47,591 |
| SD | $49,030 | $41,576 | $47,194 |
| HI | $63,910 | $50,118 | $46,145 |
| NY | $60,900 | $48,422 | $44,991 |
| CT | $57,310 | $45,827 | $44,196 |
| FL | $54,050 | $45,609 | $44,087 |
| NJ | $58,580 | $47,560 | $43,680 |
| AR | $45,230 | $37,307 | $43,126 |
| CA | $59,510 | $48,233 | $42,843 |
| OR | $57,960 | $44,230 | $42,236 |
| UT | $49,030 | $39,394 | $41,466 |
| VA | $51,850 | $41,621 | $41,311 |
| ME | $49,280 | $39,770 | $40,959 |
| DC | $56,530 | $45,374 | $40,950 |
| NH | $48,940 | $41,503 | $39,397 |
| MD | $49,280 | $39,799 | $38,281 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of chemical technicians earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $60,390.
- Take-home figures for chemical technicians assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Louisiana, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $67,036.
- The price adjustment for chemical technicians uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — Maryland anchors the bottom at $38,281. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for chemical technicians, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $60,390, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for chemical technicians assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $67,036, in Louisiana. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms figures for chemical technicians deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.