Chemists
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for chemists is the District of Columbia, at $149,860. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and New Mexico comes out ahead, worth $103,061. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for chemists: the District of Columbia leads at $149,860 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting New Mexico to $103,061 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$91,240
People doing it
82,770
Highest paid
$149,860
DC
Best off, really
$103,061
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$58,460
Highest tenth
$160,830
Lowest, really
$52,451
ME
States with data
51
National average
$100,450
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $52,451 to $103,061.
- This is a small job: about 82,770 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $91,240 in the middle.
- Interstate variation in chemists pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $52,451 to $103,061, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 82,770 workers, chemists 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.
- 51 jurisdictions report chemists, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Chemists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $58,460 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $91,240 |
| Top tenth earn over | $160,830 |
| This salary | $91,240 |
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 Chemists
The national median for this job
$91,240around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $58,460 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $91,240 |
| Top tenth | $160,830 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Chemists, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Montana · $61,890 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $149,860 |
| Spread | $87,970 |
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 | $99,640 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $102,537 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NM | $126,960 | $93,153 | $103,061 |
| MD | $140,670 | $100,862 | $97,015 |
| DC | $149,860 | $103,926 | $93,792 |
| DE | $129,860 | $92,686 | $93,383 |
| LA | $103,890 | $79,186 | $89,633 |
| WY | $102,000 | $80,587 | $88,705 |
| ND | $97,330 | $76,663 | $86,554 |
| MA | $125,000 | $90,774 | $83,865 |
| AK | $106,010 | $83,408 | $82,002 |
| AL | $97,830 | $73,562 | $81,762 |
| TX | $99,640 | $78,927 | $81,221 |
| MI | $97,440 | $73,489 | $78,027 |
| TN | $87,930 | $70,689 | $76,408 |
| RI | $101,660 | $76,871 | $75,801 |
| CO | $101,980 | $76,794 | $75,747 |
| NH | $100,050 | $79,215 | $75,196 |
| IA | $86,100 | $66,741 | $75,187 |
| MN | $99,280 | $73,446 | $74,627 |
| WV | $85,560 | $65,992 | $73,511 |
| OH | $85,270 | $67,189 | $73,181 |
| GA | $92,750 | $70,050 | $72,441 |
| KY | $84,090 | $65,162 | $72,027 |
| VA | $96,650 | $72,027 | $71,491 |
| WA | $97,420 | $77,365 | $71,263 |
| MS | $80,060 | $62,042 | $71,074 |
| CT | $98,140 | $73,224 | $70,619 |
| OR | $104,590 | $73,808 | $70,480 |
| MO | $82,800 | $64,126 | $69,882 |
| KS | $82,820 | $62,761 | $69,762 |
| AR | $75,570 | $59,656 | $68,960 |
| NC | $82,620 | $64,165 | $68,160 |
| VT | $86,120 | $65,842 | $68,135 |
| NV | $81,170 | $65,933 | $67,986 |
| IN | $78,770 | $61,950 | $67,203 |
| OK | $74,960 | $58,692 | $66,479 |
| SC | $79,670 | $61,911 | $66,445 |
| ID | $78,000 | $60,422 | $66,089 |
| WI | $78,730 | $60,997 | $65,520 |
| IL | $85,230 | $64,715 | $65,465 |
| UT | $80,770 | $62,057 | $65,322 |
| NE | $74,890 | $58,811 | $65,074 |
| FL | $82,740 | $67,038 | $64,801 |
| CA | $97,860 | $72,666 | $64,545 |
| AZ | $81,730 | $64,686 | $63,979 |
| SD | $67,440 | $56,274 | $63,879 |
| NY | $90,600 | $68,262 | $63,425 |
| PA | $77,090 | $60,696 | $62,252 |
| NJ | $84,450 | $65,051 | $59,744 |
| HI | $84,150 | $63,077 | $58,077 |
| MT | $61,890 | $49,756 | $55,135 |
| ME | $64,440 | $50,928 | $52,451 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of chemists 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 $91,240.
- One filer, no dependants, nothing paid into a pension before tax — that is the household behind every take-home figure for chemists. It is the simplest case on purpose, so the states can be compared against each other rather than against each other's family circumstances. City income taxes are not counted. On that household, the District of Columbia keeps the most at $103,926.
- Levelling out prices for chemists is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Maine sits at the bottom on $52,451.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for chemists, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $91,240, 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.
- The household modeled for chemists is a single filer, standard deduction, no dependants, no pre-tax contributions. Holding the household constant is what makes the interstate comparison meaningful; it also means the absolute figures overstate liability for most real filers. On that basis the District of Columbia retains the most, $103,926. Municipal and school-district income taxes are not included in any state.
- The price deflation applied to chemists uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Maine at $52,451. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Maine anchors the bottom at $52,451 — and the two source series are dated independently.