Optometrist Salary in Ohio 2026,
$134,850 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Ohio figure is $134,850 a year, or $64.83 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $63,650 at the 10th percentile to $190,630 at the 90th. That is 1.3% below the national median of $136,570. The SOC match is exact, 29-1041, so this is a clean measurement — but the band's width reflects a profession with a great deal of part-time and multi-location working.

Cincinnati, at $156,990, well clear of Dayton-Kettering-Beavercreek $139,000, Cleveland $135,880, Columbus $133,370 and Akron $131,210. An eighteen-thousand-dollar gap between first and second is unusually large for an Ohio occupation and points to practice structure — ownership and medical eye care concentration — rather than to cost of living, which varies little across these metros.

The State Vision Professionals Board, the consolidated body carrying the former State Board of Optometry's functions along with optical dispensing regulation. Licensure requires a Doctor of Optometry degree from an accredited school, the National Board of Examiners in Optometry sequence, and renewal with continuing education. The board also grants therapeutic pharmaceutical agent authority, which is what allows an optometrist to treat and manage ocular disease rather than only refract and dispense.

Because practice mode varies more than skill does. OEWS reports annual earnings, and optometry has a high rate of part-time, locum and multi-location working — so a clinician practising three days a week in a commercial setting appears on the same row as a full-time practice owner. That is most of the distance between the $63,650 tenth percentile and the $93,560 twenty-fifth. Above the median, the width comes from medical scope and ownership rather than from hours.

On the state side, considerably: a flat 2.75% rate for 2026 with roughly the first twenty-six thousand dollars of taxable income exempt is low by any standard, and against peers publishing similar gross figures — Indiana $135,500, Pennsylvania $135,400, Rhode Island $134,520 — Ohio's net position is strong. The municipal layer is the complication. Most cities levy 1% to 2.5% and the tax follows where work is performed, so an optometrist covering multiple locations may owe in more than one municipality, and a practice owner also faces the municipal net profits tax.

It changes which market the optometrist is in. Without medical scope, an optometrist competes for refraction and dispensing against retail chains and online sellers, in a market where price is visible and falling. With therapeutic pharmaceutical agent authority granted by the State Vision Professionals Board, the same clinician can diagnose and manage glaucoma, treat ocular surface disease and infection, monitor diabetic eye disease and co-manage surgical patients — services billed as medical rather than vision care, reimbursed differently and not substitutable online. Ohio has expanded optometric scope over time, and the practical consequence is visible in this band: the $163,050 seventy-fifth percentile is medical eye care, and the routine refraction end of the profession is where the lower quartile lives.

Practice structure rather than geography. Optometry income in the upper half of the band is heavily influenced by ownership, and the Cincinnati market has a substantial base of established private and group practices with medical eye care volume and optical dispensaries attached. Dayton-Kettering-Beavercreek at $139,000 shows a similar if weaker pattern. Cleveland $135,880 and Columbus $133,370 are large metros with more employed and health-system optometry, and Akron at $131,210 rounds out the table. In a 1,300-person statewide occupation, a concentration of practice owners in one metro can move that metro's median by a great deal.

Not on its own, and read against the wage it points the other way. Ohio employs optometrists at about 85% of the national rate for its employment size while paying within 1.3% of the national median, in a state with a low flat income tax. That is a market with room in it rather than a saturated one. What the small absolute number — 1,300 optometrists, roughly 70 pro-rated openings a year — does mean is that individual job search is lumpy: a new graduate may face few employed openings in a given metro at a given moment, which is one reason Ohio optometry careers so often move toward associateship and then ownership rather than through a series of employed posts.