Medical Laboratory Technician Salary in Texas 2026,
$59,290 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Texas figure is $59,290 a year, or $28.51 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 5.8% below the national median of $62,930 — with a band from $38,330 at the 10th percentile to $94,830 at the 90th. The row is SOC 29-2010, Clinical Laboratory Technologists and Technicians, which OEWS reports as a combined group, so it covers both associate-level technicians and bachelor's-level technologists.

Texarkana at $61,620, then Lubbock $61,490, Beaumont-Port Arthur $61,380, Killeen-Temple $61,370 and Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands $61,350 — all within $270 of one another, and four of the five outside the state's largest metros. Laboratories must be staffed around the clock whatever the city's size, and smaller Texas markets pay to cover shifts they cannot easily fill.

No. Texas is one of the states with no licensure requirement for clinical laboratory scientists or technicians — no state examination, registration or continuing-education mandate exists. The binding rules are federal: CLIA sets personnel qualifications according to the complexity of the testing performed, and laboratories must meet them. Employers therefore screen on the degree and on national certification, with ASCP the dominant credential. This makes Texas straightforward to enter and makes moving to a licensure state such as California or New York harder than expected.

Education and testing complexity, primarily. A medical laboratory technician typically holds an associate degree and performs moderate-complexity testing; a medical laboratory scientist or technologist holds a bachelor's degree and performs high-complexity testing, troubleshoots instrumentation and validates methods. Because OEWS reports the two together in SOC 29-2010, the $59,290 median describes a blend of them — the $44,990 twenty-fifth percentile is closer to technician territory and the $77,750 seventy-fifth closer to experienced technologist and specialist work.

Both things are true, and automation reconciles them. High-throughput analysers have reduced the headcount needed per test, so the occupation is not expanding — but laboratories still need bodies on every shift, and the workforce is ageing while training programmes have contracted. About 2,000 openings a year in Texas, pro-rated from the national figure, against a workforce of 29,530 is a substantial replacement flow. The shortage is felt most acutely on nights and weekends and in small-metro and rural hospitals, which is precisely what the metro table shows.

Because a hospital laboratory is an indivisible service. Whether a facility runs a thousand tests a day or a hundred, it needs a qualified technologist present on every shift under CLIA personnel rules, and a smaller market has a smaller pool of certified people to draw from and no training programme feeding it locally. Texarkana at $61,620 and Lubbock at $61,490 are paying for that inelasticity. Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands at $61,350 sits in the same range for a different reason — scale and a large medical complex — which is why the top of the table is so flat.

The combined SOC group is the main one: technologists and technicians have different education requirements, different scopes under CLIA and different pay, and reporting them together produces a median that describes neither precisely. Beyond that, shift differentials are a large part of laboratory compensation — night and weekend coverage is the hardest to staff and the best paid — and the annualised figure blends people working very different rosters. The $28.51 hourly median is the better comparator for anyone evaluating a specific schedule.

The degree and the certification level, since moving from technician to technologist scope changes what a laboratory may assign under CLIA and is most of the distance from the $44,990 twenty-fifth percentile to the $77,750 seventy-fifth. Then specialty certification — blood banking, microbiology and molecular diagnostics are the scarcest and best-paid sections. Then shift, with nights and weekends carrying real differentials in a chronically hard-to-staff field. And then supervision and quality responsibility, which is what the $94,830 ninetieth percentile describes.