Environmental Scientists and Specialists, Including Health
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia comes first for this job on every measure. $132,620 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $84,480 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For environmental scientists and specialists, including health, the District of Columbia's $132,620 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $84,480. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$82,220
People doing it
89,250
Highest paid
$132,620
DC
Best off, really
$84,480
DC, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$52,520
Highest tenth
$140,010
Lowest, really
$49,353
FL
States with data
51
National average
$91,680
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
110.8%
DC, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $49,353 to $84,480.
- Just 89,250 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $82,220, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Geographic dispersion in environmental scientists and specialists, including health is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $49,353 to $84,480 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 89,250 are employed nationally in environmental scientists and specialists, including health — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for environmental scientists and specialists, including health, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Environmental Scientists and Specialists, Including Health
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $52,520 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $82,220 |
| Top tenth earn over | $140,010 |
| This salary | $82,220 |
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 Environmental Scientists and Specialists, Including Health
The national median for this job
$82,220around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $52,520 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $82,220 |
| Top tenth | $140,010 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Environmental Scientists and Specialists, Including Health, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $57,220 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $132,620 |
| Spread | $75,400 |
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 | $92,000 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $94,675 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC | $132,620 | $93,608 | $84,480 |
| ND | $84,570 | $67,935 | $76,700 |
| TX | $92,000 | $73,552 | $75,690 |
| RI | $100,730 | $76,261 | $75,200 |
| NM | $86,630 | $66,860 | $73,972 |
| AK | $91,960 | $73,524 | $72,284 |
| UT | $90,710 | $68,608 | $72,217 |
| WA | $98,300 | $77,984 | $71,834 |
| WV | $82,100 | $63,716 | $70,976 |
| IA | $78,780 | $61,870 | $69,699 |
| NV | $83,050 | $67,256 | $69,350 |
| CA | $106,510 | $77,946 | $69,236 |
| MA | $100,640 | $74,918 | $69,216 |
| MT | $80,260 | $62,119 | $68,835 |
| OH | $78,540 | $62,639 | $68,226 |
| TN | $76,840 | $62,887 | $67,975 |
| GA | $85,710 | $65,449 | $67,683 |
| MN | $88,000 | $66,277 | $67,343 |
| OK | $75,910 | $59,317 | $67,188 |
| WY | $74,050 | $60,924 | $67,062 |
| KS | $78,210 | $59,775 | $66,443 |
| OR | $97,440 | $69,403 | $66,274 |
| CO | $85,990 | $66,249 | $65,346 |
| SD | $68,230 | $56,830 | $64,510 |
| LA | $69,820 | $56,240 | $63,660 |
| AZ | $80,600 | $63,920 | $63,221 |
| SC | $74,910 | $58,878 | $63,189 |
| IL | $81,590 | $62,335 | $63,057 |
| AL | $72,490 | $56,723 | $63,047 |
| MI | $76,080 | $59,370 | $63,036 |
| VT | $77,460 | $60,321 | $62,422 |
| KY | $71,040 | $56,438 | $62,384 |
| NH | $80,810 | $65,680 | $62,347 |
| VA | $82,230 | $62,711 | $62,245 |
| NC | $74,130 | $58,531 | $62,175 |
| MD | $84,190 | $64,422 | $61,965 |
| PA | $76,110 | $60,037 | $61,576 |
| WI | $72,820 | $57,191 | $61,431 |
| ID | $70,350 | $55,446 | $60,646 |
| CT | $82,070 | $62,802 | $60,568 |
| NY | $82,160 | $62,790 | $58,341 |
| NE | $64,040 | $51,426 | $56,902 |
| IN | $64,700 | $52,287 | $56,721 |
| NJ | $79,210 | $61,699 | $56,665 |
| HI | $79,510 | $60,166 | $55,397 |
| ME | $66,480 | $52,429 | $53,997 |
| AR | $57,220 | $46,498 | $53,750 |
| MO | $61,050 | $49,302 | $53,728 |
| MS | $57,780 | $46,387 | $53,140 |
| DE | $64,690 | $51,120 | $51,505 |
| FL | $60,830 | $51,057 | $49,353 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $82,220 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for this job 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $93,608.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Florida, on $49,353.
- All wage figures for environmental scientists and specialists, including health are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $82,220. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for environmental scientists and specialists, including health 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 $93,608, in the District of Columbia. 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 results for environmental scientists and specialists, including health rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Florida anchors the distribution at $49,353. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.