Opticians made a median of $47,260 a year in May 2025 — $22.72 an hour — in Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data covering wage-and-salary employees.
Earnings ran from $35,610 at the 10th percentile to $76,750 at the 90th.
Pay varies widely by state and setting.
Licensing requirements vary by state and ABO/NCLE certification is voluntary, but our research found no national source that publishes a pay premium for either.
Median annual and hourly pay
The median wage for opticians, dispensing — the occupation the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks as SOC 29-2081 — was $47,260 a year in May 2025, equal to $22.72 an hour.
Half of the wage-and-salary opticians in the survey earned more than the median, half earned less.
The mean wage was $51,770, higher than the median.
BLS’s Occupational Outlook Handbook reports the same $47,260 median for May 2025, so the two BLS products agree.
These figures count employees only.
The OEWS survey that produces them does not collect pay for self-employed workers, and BLS’s Employment Projections characteristics put self-employment among opticians at 1.6% in 2025.
Hourly, the national median was $22.72 in May 2025.
Inside offices of optometrists, the occupation’s largest employer group, the median hourly wage ran lower at $21.79.
Optician pay range: low to high
The percentile spread shows how wide the range runs: $35,610 at the 10th percentile, $76,750 at the 90th, and the $47,260 median in between.
| Percentile | Annual wage, May 2025 (US) |
|---|---|
| 10th | $35,610 |
| 25th | $38,820 |
| 50th (median) | $47,260 |
| 75th | $61,700 |
| 90th | $76,750 |
BLS’s Occupational Outlook Handbook frames the extremes the same way: the lowest 10 percent earned less than $35,610 and the highest 10 percent earned more than $76,750.
Inside offices of optometrists the band compresses.
The 10th percentile was $35,190 and the 90th was $60,250, with the median at $45,320 — so the very top of the practice-based range sits below the all-industry 90th percentile.
Licensed vs unlicensed optician pay
Start with what the data cannot say.
The BLS wage series we checked carries no license split, and our research did not find a primary source establishing a licensed-versus-unlicensed wage premium — so a dollar figure you see quoted for that gap is not backed by a source we could verify.
What licensing decides is who can practice where.
ABO-NCLE, the national certification body for the occupation, lists opticianry licensing boards in 22 states plus Puerto Rico on its board list read in October 2026.
Where a board exists, the state’s own requirements govern — the optician career guide covers the licensing basics role-wide.
The closest employer-published comparison the research surfaced is Costco’s own pay-range sheet, titled “Pay Ranges for iCIMS 07.14.26” and linked from its optician job postings.
It lists Licensed Optician at $21 to $32.90 an hour, plus a license premium that varies by state: $5 an hour in most states, and $6 in California, Florida, Maryland, Virginia and Washington.
The sheet’s higher tiers put the premium at $8 an hour in Washington, DC and Massachusetts, and $9 in Connecticut, North Carolina, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Tennessee and Indian Land, South Carolina.
The same sheet lists Non-Licensed Optician at $20.00 to $31.20 an hour.
Read all of that as one company’s published hiring scale — employer-specific evidence, not an industry rate, and the dollar premium attaches to a license, not to a certification.
A higher-pay state is not proof licensure pays
The certified (ABO/NCLE) pay bump
ABO and NCLE certification is run by the American Board of Opticianry & National Contact Lens Examiners, which describes its exams as voluntary competency certification for dispensing opticians and contact lens technicians — separate from state licensure.
Our research did not find an official survey that measures a pay premium for holding ABO or NCLE certification, and the BLS wage series we checked does not split optician pay by certification status.
The honest answer to “does certification raise pay” is that no federal or certifying-body data we found measures it.
The premium evidence that does exist is license-based: the employer pay sheet quoted above ties its dollar premium to a state license.
Certification’s documented value is different — it is a voluntary competency credential for the resume, with NCLE covering contact lens work and ABO covering spectacle dispensing.
If you are weighing the exams, weigh them as employability signals rather than as a pay table entry: no data we found prices a certification premium.
Optician pay by setting
Where opticians work splits between practice opticals and retail.
BLS’s largest employer groups in 2025: 43% in offices of optometrists, 23% in general merchandise retailers, 20% in health and personal care retailers and 8% in offices of physicians.
The 74,300 total is a projections-based count that includes the self-employed.
Median wages differ by industry.
BLS’s Occupational Outlook Handbook put the May 2025 medians at $60,000 in general merchandise retailers, $48,590 in offices of physicians, $47,460 in health and personal care retailers and $45,320 in offices of optometrists.
| Setting (BLS industry row) | Median wage, May 2025 |
|---|---|
| General merchandise retailers | $60,000 |
| General medical and surgical hospitals | $59,640 |
| Offices of physicians | $48,590 |
| Health and personal care retailers | $47,460 |
| Offices of optometrists | $45,320 |
Two cautions on that table.
The general merchandise row is a category spanning warehouse clubs and supercenters — BLS does not publish wages by company, so the figure belongs to the industry, not to any chain.
And the hospitals median of $59,640 comes from a very small sample of 280 reported jobs, so treat it as a signal rather than a benchmark.
Inside offices of optometrists, BLS’s industry row counted 31,920 optician jobs at a median of $45,320 ($21.79 an hour) and a mean of $45,810.
Note the pattern without over-reading it: the practice-based median sits below the $47,260 all-industry median, and the retail rows sit above it.
These are occupation-in-industry medians across whole sectors — they describe the market, not any one store or practice.
How to earn more as an optician
State is the widest visible spread.
Connecticut and Hawaii tied for the highest median at $75,300 in May 2025, followed by New Jersey ($72,460), Massachusetts ($67,210) and New York ($63,880).
At the other end, Louisiana ($36,360), Mississippi ($36,680), Alabama ($36,880), Oklahoma ($37,940) and West Virginia ($38,120) were the lowest five.
Among the states holding the most optician jobs, the medians diverge just as sharply: California ($57,990), Texas ($38,720), Florida ($58,850), New York ($63,880) and Illinois ($43,960).
Texas, second only to California in jobs, sits just above the lowest five — the biggest job markets are not automatically the best-paying ones.
State comparisons carry caveats: the figures are not cost-of-living adjusted, and states with small optician workforces carry wide error margins.
The optician salary by state (BLS) page has the full state-by-state tables.
Setting is the other data-backed lever, via the industry rows above.
Where the state licenses opticians, meeting your board’s requirements is the baseline for practice — and the one employer-published premium the research surfaced attaches to the license, not to a certificate.
Certification — ABO for spectacle dispensing, NCLE for contact lenses — is voluntary, and none of the wage tables above prices it.
It still documents competency for employers.
The market you are negotiating in is steady rather than booming: BLS projects optician employment to grow 4% from 2025 to 2035, about as fast as average, with 5,600 openings a year on average.
The projections table has the occupation at 77,400 jobs by 2035, a series that includes the self-employed.
BLS lists typical entry education for the occupation as a high school diploma or equivalent.
Career information, not licensing, legal, medical, clinical, billing or coding advice. Wage figures are BLS OEWS and Occupational Outlook Handbook data for May 2025 covering wage-and-salary workers. Confirm licensing and certification requirements with your state’s opticianry licensing board and with ABO-NCLE before you act on them.