Aquarist Salary 2026,
What Aquarists Actually Earn

How much do aquarists make in 2026?

Aquarists are pooled into the BLS animal caretakers series, where OEWS May 2025 reports a national median of $35,360 a year ($17.00 an hour) for SOC 39-2021, a bottom 10% near $27,250 and a top 10% at $50,060 across 266,910 workers. That code is dominated by kennel, grooming and shelter employment, and aquarists are a tiny part of it, so the figure describes the level of the work rather than the specific profession. Aquarium keeping is more technical than the pooled median implies. An aquarist manages life support systems — pumps, filtration, protein skimmers, ozone and UV sterilisation — alongside water chemistry that must stay inside narrow tolerances for the species held, quarantine protocols for new arrivals, and husbandry for animals whose health signs are much harder to read than a mammal's. Most aquarists also dive, which requires scientific diver certification and adds an occupational hazard element. Those technical skills are the reason aquarists with life support expertise can move into aquarium systems and facilities roles that pay above this band entirely, and it is the most reliable route out of the pay ceiling. The field is oversubscribed like the rest of the zoological sector, though slightly less severely because the technical requirement narrows the applicant pool. Employment across the pooled series is projected to grow 12.1% through 2034 with roughly 74,600 openings a year, almost none of it in aquariums. → Full aquarist career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $35,360 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 39-2021, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

Full site methodology & data sources →