What Is The Average X Ray Technician Salary?
Starting a new career is a big decision and not one that you want to make lightly. There are a lot of aspects of the decision that you have to consider including how long will it take to receive the proper training, how much that training is going to cost and how much money you can be expecting to make once you start your new job. The money invested in the schooling has to be paid back somehow, so you want to have some kind of assurances that you will be able to find a well enough paying job to make it worth your while.
X Ray Technician Salary In California
Well when it comes to starting out as an x-ray technician then you have quite a good opportunity to first of all find a job, and to find a job that can pay quite well. When you are first starting out in almost any career, you usually end up at the lower end of the pay scale and being a new grad from one of the x ray technician schools in California are no exception. To start out, an x-ray technician salary can be less than $30,000 a year. But, for very experienced and tenured x-ray technicians, they can earn as much as $90,000.
Currently, the average salary in the US is about $58,065 according to the American Society of Radiologic Technologists (ASRT). This average salary can vary significantly depending on the expected duties and in which institution you could be working as well as which state you live in.
So if you are just starting out, you can expect to earn about $36,918. Whereas, a chief technician who graduated from a top X Ray technician school can expect to earn about $42,768 and a senior technicians can make up to $48,331.
The average salary for a program director on the other hand, is higher of course running about $64,290. The X ray technician salary in New York however can be slightly higher than other smaller states, at around $57,000. So again, the salaries range from State to State. For example, a newly graduated x-ray technician who lives in Texas can expect to start with about $13.27 an hour with the maximum earning potential ending up around $21.36 an hour. If you work in Florida however, the pay scale drops a little bit and therefore you can only expect to make about $11 an hour to start and top out around $17.31 an hour as you gain more tenure and experience.
In California, the pay scales are higher again, with the starting salary for an x-ray technician coming in around $16.61, and ending up around $25.43 an hour as a few years go by. So as you can tell, where you end up living and working can be as important as the education you receive when it comes to the salary that you end up being able to make in the long run. Keeping up with your training, taking additional courses and ensuring that your certifications are kept up to date will increase your likelihood of increasing your overall salary. The number of x-ray technician jobs available is expected to increase by 15% by 2016. This is a slightly higher growth than other industries. So looking into a position like this could be a good decision to make overall.
Whichever state you do live in, the opportunities for employment as an x-ray technician and finding a competitive x-ray technician salary is well worth your while looking into if you are in the position of finding a new and exciting career.