Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists
What the pay figures show
- Maryland pays zoologists and wildlife biologists the most, $107,500. It still pays the most after tax. What it does not do is stay ahead once you count what living there costs. Level that out and Mississippi wins, at $77,649. Same work. A wage that goes further.
- For zoologists and wildlife biologists, Maryland leads both nominally at $107,500 and after tax — state income tax differentials are not large enough here to disturb the ordering. Regional price parity is: deflating take-home by each state's price level puts Mississippi first at $77,649. The adjustment that matters for this occupation is therefore cost of living rather than tax, which is the opposite of the assumption most relocation comparisons start from.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$76,780
People doing it
18,120
Highest paid
$107,500
MD
Best off, really
$77,649
MS, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$49,100
Highest tenth
$126,440
Lowest, really
$42,842
TX
States with data
47
National average
$83,020
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
87.29%
MS, 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 $42,842 to $77,649.
- This is a small job: about 18,120 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 47 jurisdictions have a figure, with $76,780 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Maryland tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in zoologists and wildlife biologists 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 $42,842 to $77,649, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 18,120 workers, zoologists and wildlife biologists 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.
- 47 jurisdictions carry a published median for zoologists and wildlife biologists. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $49,100 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $76,780 |
| Top tenth earn over | $126,440 |
| This salary | $76,780 |
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 Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists
The national median for this job
$76,780around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $49,100 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $76,780 |
| Top tenth | $126,440 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Texas · $49,100 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Maryland · $107,500 |
| Spread | $58,400 |
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 | $49,100 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $50,527 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MS | $88,710 | $67,781 | $77,649 |
| LA | $87,460 | $68,121 | $77,107 |
| MD | $107,500 | $79,631 | $76,594 |
| ND | $81,330 | $65,719 | $74,198 |
| IA | $83,000 | $64,678 | $72,863 |
| AK | $90,370 | $72,405 | $71,184 |
| DC | $107,050 | $78,009 | $70,403 |
| MT | $78,850 | $61,207 | $67,824 |
| WY | $74,150 | $60,995 | $67,139 |
| TN | $73,570 | $60,586 | $65,488 |
| MO | $76,400 | $59,924 | $65,304 |
| OH | $74,550 | $59,942 | $65,288 |
| MI | $79,150 | $61,399 | $65,190 |
| CA | $98,530 | $73,075 | $64,908 |
| AL | $74,290 | $57,919 | $64,376 |
| VT | $79,620 | $61,698 | $63,847 |
| NV | $75,180 | $61,719 | $63,641 |
| CO | $83,300 | $64,475 | $63,596 |
| PA | $78,540 | $61,672 | $63,253 |
| ID | $73,360 | $57,404 | $62,788 |
| SD | $65,890 | $55,123 | $62,572 |
| WA | $83,780 | $67,769 | $62,424 |
| IL | $79,780 | $61,151 | $61,859 |
| NM | $68,220 | $54,782 | $60,609 |
| UT | $73,920 | $57,543 | $60,571 |
| MA | $84,350 | $64,273 | $59,381 |
| ME | $74,490 | $57,526 | $59,246 |
| OR | $85,150 | $61,833 | $59,045 |
| NJ | $83,030 | $64,143 | $58,910 |
| NY | $82,640 | $63,102 | $58,631 |
| HI | $84,910 | $63,554 | $58,517 |
| WI | $68,370 | $54,324 | $58,352 |
| KS | $66,440 | $52,146 | $57,962 |
| CT | $77,300 | $59,709 | $57,585 |
| NH | $73,560 | $60,579 | $57,506 |
| OK | $62,730 | $50,261 | $56,930 |
| VA | $72,340 | $56,322 | $55,904 |
| SC | $64,090 | $51,742 | $55,531 |
| NC | $64,620 | $52,033 | $55,272 |
| KY | $61,950 | $49,906 | $55,164 |
| MN | $68,620 | $53,961 | $54,829 |
| GA | $66,210 | $52,675 | $54,473 |
| AZ | $66,880 | $54,611 | $54,014 |
| NE | $57,890 | $46,764 | $51,744 |
| IN | $54,670 | $44,524 | $48,299 |
| FL | $52,750 | $44,565 | $43,078 |
| TX | $49,100 | $41,632 | $42,842 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of zoologists and wildlife biologists 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 $76,780.
- One filer, no dependants, nothing paid into a pension before tax — that is the household behind every take-home figure for zoologists and wildlife biologists. 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, Maryland keeps the most at $79,631.
- Levelling out prices for zoologists and wildlife biologists 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 — Texas sits at the bottom on $42,842.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for zoologists and wildlife biologists, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $76,780, 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 zoologists and wildlife biologists 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 Maryland retains the most, $79,631. Municipal and school-district income taxes are not included in any state.
- The price deflation applied to zoologists and wildlife biologists 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 Texas at $42,842. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Texas anchors the bottom at $42,842 — and the two source series are dated independently.