The highest postdoc salary in the US is around $130,000 a year. Before you spend too much time applying for postdocs, it’s important to consider all of your options. In addition to increasing your earning power through more advanced training, a masters or doctorate degree can increase the likelihood that you get into your preferred PhD program and even lower the average time spent in school.
highest postdoc salary in us
The highest postdoc salary in us starts at $64,000 per year for a professor who has a PhD and has been teaching for more than 10 years. The highest salary for a professor with a PhD ranges from $146,000 to $153,000 in research. The average salary of a postdoc is roughly $63,000.
A peer-reviewed report on the salaries of nearly 14,000 postdoctoral researchers working at 52 US institutions has revealed wide disparities.
Salaries ranged from US$23,660 — the minimum wage set by the US Fair Labor Standards Act — to well over $100,000. The figures, which refer to salaries on 1 December 2016, were obtained through US Freedom of Information Act requests by members of the Future of Research, a science-advocacy group in Boston, Massachusetts.
The study represents one of few such efforts to quantify postdoc compensation in a meaningful way. Historically, it has been difficult to track postdoc wages, because individuals might be paid through their principal investigator’s grant, through their own fellowship award or directly by the university where they work. Furthermore, postdocs can be classified variously as postdoctoral scientists, research fellows, research associates or other titles, even within a single institution or organization.
The inconsistency of compensation suggests that some institutions haven’t been paying close attention to the postdocs on their campuses, says Gary McDowell, executive director of the Future of Research and co-author of the report, which was published last November1. “We’ve found that a lot of institutions can’t count their postdocs well,” he says. “It’s fair to assume that they aren’t really checking up on things like salary.”
Between the extremes, many salaries clustered around the median of about $47,500. That’s close to the starting salary set by the US National Institutes of Health for postdocs receiving National Research Service Awards (NRSA). Although the NRSA salary guideline applies to only about 15% of NIH-funded postdocs, many institutions clearly use it as a benchmark, McDowell says.
The data also suggest that female postdocs are relatively underpaid, at least in some parts of the country. The authors collected the first names of more than 7,200 postdocs and used an algorithm to estimate gender, further breaking down the data by US geographical region (northeast, south, Midwest and west). The results suggest that female postdocs in the south were paid about $1,940 less per year than were male postdocs, on average. In the northeast, home to some of the largest and most prestigious universities in the country, female postdocs received, on average, about $1,710 less than their male equivalents. In the west and Midwest, salaries were roughly equal between male and female researchers.
While our study is not a perfect ranking of the highest postdoc salary in us, it does give a good approximation of what to expect as a starting postdoc. Our sample came from academic institutions that represent diverse research specialties and regions of the country. The results of this study should provide a reasonable guide for starting postdoctoral salary expectations in the academic life sciences for any topic area and region of the country.
