Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors
What the pay figures show
- Where are this job paid best? California, at $131,540. That answer does not survive a pay stub. Take income tax out and New Hampshire is ahead. Then count what things cost locally, and Ohio wins — the money there behaves like $105,622. Three questions. Three different states.
- The nominal leader for health and safety engineers, except mining safety engineers and inspectors is California at $131,540, but the ordering does not hold through either adjustment. Applying federal, FICA and state income tax moves the top position to New Hampshire; deflating by regional price parity moves it again, to Ohio at $105,622 in national-average terms. ⚠️ Federal tax is not what does this — it is uniform across states and cannot change a ranking. State income tax reorders first, price level second, and the two act independently.
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
$115,160
People doing it
21,450
Highest paid
$131,540
CA
Best off, really
$105,622
OH, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$68,420
Highest tenth
$171,250
Lowest, really
$57,009
HI
States with data
45
National average
$119,770
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
91.81%
OH, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- The state you work in changes what this job pays, but less than you would expect. Level out tax and prices and the whole country sits between $57,009 and $105,622. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- Just 21,450 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 45 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $115,160. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, California pays most.
- Interstate variation for health and safety engineers, except mining safety engineers and inspectors is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $57,009 to $105,622. A differential of this magnitude is real but rarely decisive on its own, which is worth stating plainly against wage tables that present nominal gaps without either adjustment.
- 21,450 are employed nationally in health and safety engineers, except mining safety engineers and inspectors — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for health and safety engineers, except mining safety engineers and inspectors in 45 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $68,420 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $115,160 |
| Top tenth earn over | $171,250 |
| This salary | $115,160 |
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 Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors
The national median for this job
$115,160around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $68,420 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $115,160 |
| Top tenth | $171,250 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $76,700 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $131,540 |
| Spread | $54,840 |
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 | $123,440 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $127,029 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| OH | $129,560 | $96,974 | $105,622 |
| LA | $118,490 | $89,019 | $100,763 |
| TX | $123,440 | $95,637 | $98,418 |
| NV | $121,660 | $94,418 | $97,358 |
| NH | $130,500 | $100,463 | $95,365 |
| PA | $121,730 | $90,730 | $93,056 |
| IA | $106,350 | $80,218 | $90,369 |
| WA | $126,590 | $97,790 | $90,078 |
| KY | $107,760 | $80,985 | $89,518 |
| AR | $101,590 | $76,998 | $89,007 |
| CO | $120,950 | $89,305 | $88,088 |
| MN | $120,050 | $86,645 | $88,039 |
| MA | $131,210 | $94,708 | $87,499 |
| AL | $105,490 | $78,652 | $87,420 |
| OK | $102,890 | $77,084 | $87,311 |
| DE | $118,440 | $85,567 | $86,210 |
| NE | $103,230 | $77,459 | $85,707 |
| MI | $107,780 | $80,323 | $85,283 |
| NC | $106,800 | $80,211 | $85,205 |
| KS | $102,690 | $75,631 | $84,067 |
| UT | $106,980 | $79,330 | $83,503 |
| SC | $104,120 | $77,620 | $83,304 |
| IL | $111,370 | $81,811 | $82,758 |
| CA | $131,540 | $93,032 | $82,636 |
| CT | $115,640 | $84,494 | $81,488 |
| MT | $97,670 | $73,383 | $81,317 |
| GA | $105,880 | $78,632 | $81,316 |
| ID | $98,860 | $73,992 | $80,932 |
| AZ | $106,370 | $81,405 | $80,515 |
| NJ | $119,370 | $87,393 | $80,263 |
| NM | $94,640 | $72,103 | $79,772 |
| AK | $102,690 | $81,072 | $79,705 |
| MD | $110,950 | $81,886 | $78,763 |
| FL | $101,790 | $80,439 | $77,755 |
| OR | $116,020 | $80,849 | $77,204 |
| VA | $104,920 | $77,369 | $76,794 |
| MS | $87,180 | $66,766 | $76,486 |
| WI | $92,700 | $69,996 | $75,186 |
| MO | $89,820 | $68,734 | $74,905 |
| RI | $94,620 | $72,253 | $71,247 |
| IN | $83,240 | $64,963 | $70,471 |
| NY | $101,300 | $75,158 | $69,833 |
| WV | $76,700 | $60,165 | $67,019 |
| ME | $82,140 | $62,385 | $64,250 |
| HI | $82,300 | $61,916 | $57,009 |
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 $115,160 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 New Hampshire, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $100,463.
- 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 Hawaii, on $57,009.
- All wage figures for health and safety engineers, except mining safety engineers and inspectors are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $115,160. 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 health and safety engineers, except mining safety engineers and inspectors 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 $100,463, in New Hampshire. 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 health and safety engineers, except mining safety engineers and inspectors 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; Hawaii anchors the distribution at $57,009. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.