Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

Jupiter research has collated the salaries of scientists in the US. The median salary for “experienced astronomers” is $87K, and for “experienced physicists” it’s the whopping $106k. It would have been nice to see the differences between academic scientists and those working in industry within different fields (although I can’t imagine that there are too many industrial astronomers; it appears that they have less data on astronomers than researchers in other fields). They do split off a generic “experienced academic researcher” with a median salary way down at $67k. That seems, perhaps depressingly, about right.