Optometrists earned a median of $136,570 a year in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' payroll survey — $65.66 an hour.
The spread is wide: 10 percent of employed ODs earned less than $74,870 and 10 percent earned more than $202,180.
Those figures cover employees only.
Practice owners and other self-employed optometrists are not in the wage data, and this page explains what they report separately — and why optometrist salary numbers disagree.
How much does an optometrist make a year?
The federal pay survey gives the direct answer.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program put the median annual wage for optometrists (SOC 29-1041) at $136,570 in May 2025, with a mean of $141,550, across 42,790 wage-and-salary jobs.
A median is the midpoint — half the payroll optometrists in the survey earned more, half earned less.
The mean is the simple average, and it sits higher because the occupation's top earners pull it up.
The range around the middle is wide.
BLS's annual wage percentiles for May 2025:
| Percentile | Annual wage |
|---|---|
| 10th | $74,870 |
| 25th | $109,400 |
| 50th (median) | $136,570 |
| 75th | $165,120 |
| 90th | $202,180 |
One boundary matters for everything else on this page.
OEWS is a payroll survey — it counts employees, so practice owners, sublease ODs who own their practices and other self-employed optometrists are not in these numbers at all.
State moves the number too.
The five highest-median states in May 2025 were Alaska ($170,310), Maryland ($165,840), North Carolina ($161,560), Delaware ($161,270) and New York ($161,140).
The five lowest were Oklahoma ($97,350), South Dakota ($102,320), Idaho ($103,390), Montana ($104,280) and Mississippi ($108,070).
Read state rankings with two cautions: the figures are not adjusted for living costs, and states where BLS counts few optometrists — Alaska has 60 payroll ODs — carry wide error margins.
Job counts and medians do not sort together.
The states with the most payroll optometrist jobs were California (6,890 jobs, $136,300), Texas (4,110, $126,000), New York (2,390, $161,140), Florida (2,350, $151,670) and Pennsylvania (1,720, $135,400).
New York appears on both lists — a top-five job market and a top-five median.
The full state-by-state table is on our optometrist salary by state (BLS) page.
Who the numbers count
Optometrist pay per hour, per day and per month
BLS publishes the occupation on two bases.
The national median is $136,570 a year or $65.66 an hour across all industries; in offices of optometrists, the largest setting for payroll ODs in BLS's table, it is $129,250 a year or $62.14 an hour.
Per-day and per-month figures are different animals.
The BLS tables cited in this guide publish annual and hourly medians; a daily or monthly optometrist figure is not among them.
Daily rates show up in employer job postings, where each employer sets its own number, and a monthly figure only means something once you know the schedule behind it.
Schedules are not uniform, either.
BLS notes most optometrists work full time, part-time work is common, and schedules may include evenings and weekends — so two ODs on the same hourly rate can land on very different annual totals.
When a posting quotes a daily rate, treat it as that employer's figure for that location and schedule, not an industry rate.
The federal tables cited here report no daily rate.
Why optometrist salary figures disagree
Search two sites for optometrist pay and you will get two numbers.
The disagreement traces to four things: who the survey counted, which statistic it published, which industry row it used, and which year it measured.
Who is counted is the biggest.
The wage figures above cover payroll optometrists — 42,790 of them in May 2025.
BLS's employment counts, which include the self-employed, put the profession at 45,100 jobs in 2025.
Same occupation, different universes, and owner income sits outside the wage series entirely.
Median versus mean moves the figure too — $136,570 against $141,550 in the same release — because the top earners pull the average up.
Industry rows split the occupation into different medians.
BLS's handbook table for May 2025 shows $207,030 in outpatient care centers, $159,250 in retail trade, $145,630 in offices of physicians and $129,250 in offices of optometrists — one profession, four medians.
Measure and year matter as much.
The American Optometric Association's Survey of Optometric Practice is the profession's own survey, and the release this page cites — its 2022 survey — reports 2021 income results.
It measures net income — what responding ODs cleared after practice expenses — as an average across self-selected respondents, not a wage.
That survey put average net income at $168,193 for 2021.
Job boards and recruiting sites publish optometrist salary reports as well.
This page cites none of them: every figure here comes from BLS or the AOA survey, with its year attached, so you can see exactly what each number measures.
Match the measure before you compare
Starting pay vs experienced pay
Neither BLS source on this page splits optometrist pay by years of experience, so this page has no federal starting-salary figure to quote — and it does not substitute a job-board survey for one.
The percentile table above is the closest federal picture.
It is one distribution over the whole occupation, so it bounds the market rather than naming where a new graduate lands: the 25th percentile was $109,400 and the 10th was $74,870 in May 2025.
The clearest career-stage signal in the sourced data sits in the AOA survey's owner tracking, which the section below covers — ownership, more than tenure alone, is where its income gap widens.
Structure varies as much as stage.
An associate offer can be a straight salary, a base plus production, or per-diem coverage, and each reads differently against the same percentile table.
The license, training and job-search context behind the numbers is in our optometrist career guide.
Pay by setting: private practice, corporate, sublease, medical and VA
Setting moves the median too.
BLS's largest-employers table for 2025 puts 61 percent of the profession's 45,100 jobs in offices of optometrists, 14 percent in offices of physicians, 13 percent in retail trade, 5 percent self-employed and 4 percent in outpatient care centers.
Each setting pays on its own median.
From BLS's handbook table for May 2025:
| Setting | Median wage, May 2025 |
|---|---|
| Outpatient care centers | $207,030 |
| Retail trade | $159,250 |
| Offices of physicians | $145,630 |
| Offices of optometrists | $129,250 |
Size the rows before you lean on them.
The offices-of-physicians median covers 6,050 payroll ODs, and that industry row includes optometrists employed in physician-led and ophthalmology practices.
General medical and surgical hospitals paid a $159,790 median across just 470 payroll jobs, and the outpatient care centers median sits on the 4 percent of the profession BLS counts in that setting.
Corporate optometry is not one of the industry rows in BLS's handbook table; retail trade is the closest row it publishes, and it covers employed ODs at retailers generally — not one optical chain.
The AOA survey, measuring net income among its own respondents, found corporate-affiliated non-owners reported the lowest average among non-owners in 2021: $124,724.
Government-employed ODs reported the highest non-owner average at $163,834, ahead of $158,816 for ODs in non-optometrist health care settings.
Different measures — but the corporate-pays-best assumption comes from neither source.
Sublease ODs who own their practices are outside the BLS wage data, because the payroll survey does not collect self-employed workers.
The AOA figures cited here split owners and non-owners rather than leased and employed, so the figures on this page give no national sublease pay figure to quote.
The VA publishes a scale.
Public Law 118-210, signed January 2, 2025, moved VA optometrists into the Title 38 physician, dentist and podiatrist pay system: base pay plus market pay plus performance pay.
The department's Pay Table 1 for optometry lists three base-plus-market pay tiers — $123,077–$315,000, $145,000–$335,000 and $165,000–$350,000 — applicable from December 28, 2025, and performance pay is capped at the lower of $15,000 or 7.5 percent of base plus market pay in a fiscal year.
Those are allowed ranges, not typical pay.
Who employs the OD changes what the number is
Associate vs owner income
Owner income is not in the federal wage data at all — the payroll survey does not collect self-employed workers — so this section rests on the AOA's Survey of Optometric Practice, which reports what responding ODs cleared after practice expenses.
In that survey, responding ODs averaged $168,193 in net income for 2021, up 19 percent from $140,913 in 2015.
Owners averaged $204,773 against $145,432 for non-owners, and private-practice owners specifically averaged $198,023.
Net income is a business number, not a salary.
Responding owners billed $1,242,517 gross on average and carried $402,636 in practice expenses — the owner's income is what survives those costs, and it moves with the practice's billings and expenses in a way a salary does not.
Where the money came from in 2021: direct patient payment led at 31 percent, then vision plans at 30 percent, private medical insurance at 23 percent and government programs at 16 percent.
In the survey's respondent pool, 37 percent practiced in private practice and 62 percent of those were solo owners, while 17 percent were affiliated with corporate practices — 20 percent of those as independent contractors.
Career stage sharpens the gap.
Owners' net income peaked at ages 60–65 in the 2021 data, and the widest owner-over-non-owner gap sat among ODs 7–10 years into practice, where owners earned $83,882 more on average.
Read all of it as 2021 survey averages from self-selected respondents — averages, not medians, and five years old at this writing.
It is the owner picture this page has, and it is not a payroll number.
What cuts into take-home: student debt, malpractice and fees
Gross pay is not take-home, and the largest fixed cost this page can put a number on is student debt.
ASCO, the optometric-education association, reports average educational debt of $209,280 among 2024–25 graduates who had debt — 78.6 percent of the 1,340 graduates in its count.
That figure counts graduate and professional debt but not undergraduate debt, and ASCO notes it is incomplete because not every school reports each year.
Averaged across all graduates, the figure was $164,575.
The debt load has more than doubled since 2000–01, when graduates with debt averaged $95,291.
Professional fees recur after graduation too.
Whether an OD needs a DEA registration at all depends on the state's scope of practice for prescribing controlled substances.
Where one is needed, a practitioner registration for dispensing or instructing (Schedules II–V) costs $888 and covers a three-year registration period.
State license renewal and continuing education run on each state board's own cycle and fee schedule.
Malpractice insurance is the recurring cost this page will not put a number on: no national premium benchmark appears in the sources used here, so no figure is quoted.
Bases matter when you compare offers or plan a budget.
An employed OD's gross salary runs through tax withholding and benefit elections before it reaches the account; an owner's net income arrives already carrying the practice's expenses.
Debt service comes out of whichever base you have.
Career and salary information, not medical, licensing, billing, legal or tax advice. The pay figures here are their sources' own, with dates. Confirm license renewal and continuing-education requirements with your state board of optometry, and wage-and-hour questions with the U.S. Department of Labor or your state labor agency.