Opticians, Dispensing
What the pay figures show
- Connecticut comes first for opticians, dispensing on every measure. $75,300 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $56,334 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For opticians, dispensing, Connecticut's $75,300 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $56,334. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$47,260
People doing it
73,530
Highest paid
$75,300
CT
Best off, really
$56,334
CT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$35,610
Highest tenth
$76,750
Lowest, really
$33,618
AL
States with data
51
National average
$51,770
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
103.69%
CT, 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 $33,618 to $56,334.
- This is a small job: about 73,530 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 $47,260. Nothing is missing.
- Interstate variation in opticians, dispensing 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 $33,618 to $56,334, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 73,530 workers, opticians, dispensing 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 opticians, dispensing is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Opticians, Dispensing
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $35,610 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $47,260 |
| Top tenth earn over | $76,750 |
| This salary | $47,260 |
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 Opticians, Dispensing
The national median for this job
$47,260around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $35,610 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $47,260 |
| Top tenth | $76,750 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Opticians, Dispensing, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Louisiana · $36,360 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $75,300 |
| Spread | $38,940 |
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 | $38,720 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $39,846 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| CT | $75,300 | $58,412 | $56,334 |
| HI | $75,300 | $57,524 | $52,964 |
| NJ | $72,460 | $57,350 | $52,671 |
| MA | $67,210 | $53,072 | $49,032 |
| VT | $57,350 | $46,586 | $48,208 |
| AK | $58,250 | $48,984 | $48,158 |
| FL | $58,850 | $49,466 | $47,815 |
| NY | $63,880 | $50,655 | $47,066 |
| OH | $50,500 | $42,084 | $45,838 |
| TN | $49,840 | $42,226 | $45,643 |
| VA | $55,820 | $44,582 | $44,251 |
| DC | $61,310 | $48,904 | $44,136 |
| NC | $50,190 | $41,014 | $43,567 |
| ND | $45,230 | $38,522 | $43,493 |
| SC | $48,000 | $39,881 | $42,801 |
| MT | $47,050 | $38,530 | $42,695 |
| SD | $43,400 | $37,052 | $42,059 |
| CA | $57,990 | $47,103 | $41,839 |
| NH | $51,980 | $43,946 | $41,716 |
| IA | $44,480 | $36,841 | $41,503 |
| NV | $46,910 | $39,872 | $41,114 |
| AR | $42,880 | $35,506 | $41,044 |
| GA | $48,010 | $38,959 | $40,289 |
| KY | $44,290 | $36,334 | $40,163 |
| AZ | $48,210 | $40,114 | $39,676 |
| MN | $48,020 | $39,014 | $39,641 |
| WI | $44,820 | $36,837 | $39,568 |
| ME | $47,220 | $38,254 | $39,398 |
| ID | $43,950 | $36,018 | $39,396 |
| WA | $49,220 | $41,728 | $38,437 |
| RI | $47,400 | $38,908 | $38,367 |
| CO | $47,310 | $38,820 | $38,291 |
| PA | $45,450 | $37,304 | $38,260 |
| MD | $48,700 | $39,361 | $37,860 |
| DE | $46,220 | $37,319 | $37,600 |
| WY | $39,100 | $33,597 | $36,981 |
| NE | $39,830 | $33,075 | $36,597 |
| NM | $39,090 | $32,875 | $36,372 |
| OR | $49,210 | $37,965 | $36,253 |
| KS | $40,140 | $32,481 | $36,104 |
| IL | $43,960 | $35,471 | $35,881 |
| MI | $41,180 | $33,769 | $35,854 |
| UT | $41,780 | $33,891 | $35,674 |
| OK | $37,940 | $31,458 | $35,632 |
| IN | $39,370 | $32,682 | $35,453 |
| WV | $38,120 | $31,826 | $35,452 |
| MO | $38,750 | $32,432 | $35,343 |
| LA | $36,360 | $30,691 | $34,740 |
| MS | $36,680 | $30,277 | $34,685 |
| TX | $38,720 | $33,292 | $34,259 |
| AL | $36,880 | $30,246 | $33,618 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of opticians, dispensing 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 $47,260.
- Take-home figures for opticians, dispensing 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 Connecticut, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $58,412.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for opticians, dispensing. 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 Alabama, on $33,618.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for opticians, dispensing, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $47,260, 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 opticians, dispensing 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 $58,412, in Connecticut. 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 opticians, dispensing 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; Alabama anchors the distribution at $33,618. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.