Medical Laboratory Technician Salary in Georgia 2026,
$62,180 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Georgia figure is $62,180 a year, or $29.89 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $37,970 at the 10th percentile to $101,020 at the 90th. That is 1.2% below the national median of $62,930. The row — SOC 29-2010 — is the combined clinical laboratory technologist and technician group, so it is broader than the technician title and the upper half of the band mostly describes bachelor's-level technologists.

Augusta-Richmond County, at $67,040, then Rome $65,840, Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell $65,530, Hinesville $63,520 and Dalton $63,040. The Augusta figure is driven by academic medical centre and hospital laboratory volume in a small metro, and the whole spread is under $4,000 — laboratory pay in Georgia is remarkably geographically flat compared with, say, engineering.

No. Georgia has no clinical laboratory personnel licence, no state examination and no state registry. Laboratories are regulated federally under CLIA, which sets personnel qualification standards by test complexity, and employers screen on ASCP Board of Certification credentials — MLT(ASCP) at technician level, MLS(ASCP) at technologist level — typically following a NAACLS-accredited programme. In practice the certification functions as the licence even though the state does not issue one.

The record cannot separate them — BLS reports the two together on SOC 29-2010 — but the shape of the band is informative. Certified technician roles cluster around the $47,230 to $62,180 stretch, while the $83,460 seventy-fifth percentile and the $101,020 ninetieth are overwhelmingly technologist, specialty and supervisory positions. Because Georgia licenses neither tier, completing the bachelor's-level MLS pathway is the single clearest mechanism a technician has for moving into the upper half.

Closely. The peer table puts North Dakota at $62,680, Arizona $62,530, Tennessee $62,070, Kansas $62,050 and West Virginia $61,810 — all within about $900 of Georgia's $62,180. Clinical laboratory wages are set by hospital budgets and a nationally certified workforce, and neither varies dramatically by state. Georgia's advantage over most of that group is the absence of a state licensing fee or renewal cycle and a flat 5.49% income tax with no local add-on.

Because it is the difference between a career expectation and a statistical artefact. SOC 29-2010 reports technologists and technicians as one group, and the two have different entry requirements — an associate degree and MLT certification against a bachelor's degree and MLS certification — and different pay ceilings. A $37,970 tenth percentile and a $101,020 ninetieth on the same row is what happens when you average them. Georgia's $62,180 median therefore sits above where most technician-titled posts actually pay and well below the specialty technologist tier.

Mobility in, and no protection once you are there. A certified technician moving to Georgia from a licensing state such as New York, California or Florida has nothing to apply for and no fee to pay; the ASCP certification travels intact and the employer's CLIA-based competence assessment is the only hurdle. The other side of it is that Georgia has no scope-of-practice statute for laboratory personnel, so what a technician is permitted to do is determined by the laboratory's CLIA complexity level and its own procedures rather than by state law — which makes the employer's testing menu a genuine factor in what the job teaches you.

No, and the pro-rated figure of about 780 openings a year in Georgia is the more useful number. Laboratory employment grows slowly because automation keeps raising tests processed per staff member, but the workforce is old and retirement-driven replacement demand is large and steady. The sections that are actually expanding — molecular diagnostics, transfusion medicine, microbiology with rapid identification platforms — are also the ones that pay toward the $83,460 seventy-fifth percentile, so the growth and the money happen to point at the same specialisations.