physics phd student salary

PhysStipendRankings: PhD Stipend Rankings

PhysStipendRankings is a stipend-based ranking of top-paying Physics departments in US. We may implement support for other countries and you are welcomed to contribute! For a real academic ranking, please refer to U.S.News , etc.

• Stipend is the annual, 12-month, pre-tax allowance graciously granted by the institution. Note that some departments do not have guaranteed summer funding , and we are currently working to collect such data. Departments with summer funding guarentee are tagged with a summer label. For now, the list is not complete.
• Fees are annual non-reimbursible tariffs (including health insurance) reclaimed by said institution.
• Living cost is calculated based on the MIT Living Wage Calculator for the institution's city.

We have received a lot of comments that the living cost calculated by the MIT Living Cost Calculator does not really reflect the real living cost in multiple areas. We are considering alternative metrics and data sources. If you are aware of something we can use, please feel free to submit issues or pull requests on GitHub.

This ranking is part informational and part satire, designed to democratize information on how PhD students in physics and related areas are paid for their labor – inadequately , in most cases.

Most of the frontend code of this website is from CSRankings , and we intentionally used the same template. The code of this website can be found at https://github.com/PhysStipendRankings/PhysStipendRankings , and the data presented can be found as a CSV file here .

Contributing: Everyone is welcomed to submit patches or report the stipend via pull requests . Another option to submit valuable datapoints is through this Google Form . Also, feel free to submit issues on GitHub .

• Gathering data for summer funding guarantees. We plan to incorporate a feature that allows users to exclude non-guaranteed funds when calculating the stipends.
• Highlighting universities that offer 100% appointments during the summer, e.g. UW, instead of the typical 50% appointments.
• Adding a verification system for stipends, where we can confirm the details of the stipend with an offer letter or paystub record, and displaying a checkmark in the "Stipend" column to indicate that the stipend is verified.
• Add alternative sources of living cost. In the future, users should have the ability to choose between different sources of living cost while ranking.
• Data is often unavailable for the precise district in which the university is located. In such cases, we use data for the county or wider metro area. This often skews the estimate lower. For instance, UC San Diego is located in La Jolla, one of the most expensive districts in the US, but we resort to using figures for the wider San Diego county. Same goes for Princeton vs. Mercer County, etc.
• The Calculator states that the estimates are what is required "to cover the costs of their family's basic needs where they live". However, how much one needs to sustain onself is subjective, and users have reported that they can live on much less.

PhysStipendRankings is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License . The frontend (i.e., CSS and HTML) of this website is based on CSRankings, a work at https://github.com/emeryberger/CSrankings . The copyright of CSRankings is owned by Emery Berger . The copyright of the non-CSRankings part of PhysStipendRankings is owned by its contributors .

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Physics Graduate Student Pay Data

Graduate students are the workhorses and the lifeblood of academia. At most Universities in the United States, graduate students perform more than 50% of the total University teaching hours, more than 50% of the research hours (and much more than this if you include research hours performed by postdocs), and a host of administrative duties, but are paid much less than 50% of total academic salary allocations. Graduate students—who do most of the work—are, in fact, routinely paid below the living wage in the cities where they live [1-6]. This chronic underpayment problem leads to a host of ills for individual graduate students and for academia at large.

Graduate students in Physics are no exception [7]. 

[1] C. Woolston, Nature 605 , 775 (2022).

[2] K. Langin, Science 376 , 1033 (2022).

[3] C. Woolston, Nature 611 , 189 (2022).

[4] Nature 611, 8 (2022). Editorial.

[5] M. Kirchner, J. Petzoldt, American Entomologist 68 , 22 (2022).

[6] A. K. Glasmeier, Living Wage Calculator , Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2022).

[7] J. Acres, APS News 31 (2022).

Below are two figures that explore the graduate pay problem in Physics. The first is a scatter plot of all responses to our crowdsourcing survey plotted against the MIT Living Wage for the cities in which the respondents to our survey live. More information on how the MIT Living Wage is calculated can be found here . We have also included the University-reported Physics graduate salary for several institutions. Any discrepancy between the University-reported and student-reported salaries may be an interesting subject for future study. The red line in this figure represents the condition when graduate salaries match the living wage. Graduate salaries are very often below this line, sometimes by a large margin.

The second figure below shows a comparison of the graduate salaries and living wages at the top 10 largest Physics PhD programs (by average graduating class size for 2019-2021 [8]), accounting for approximately 20% of all Physics graduate students in the United States. None of these programs offer a graduate salary commensurate with the living wage. This figure also shows the MIT Living Wage required for 1 adult and 1 child, which is often more than double the salary of an individual graduate student. This places graduate study in Physics far out of reach for nearly all single parents.

[8] Data graciously provided by the American Institute of Physics' Statistical Research Center (SRC) .

Figure 1. Physics graduate pay survey data.

Don’t see your College or University represented above? If you are a Physics graduate student at a University in the United States, please fill out our google form below! 

Do you see your College or University, but Physics graduate pay has changed since these plots were last updated? Please fill out our google form below!

Please note that this data is updated periodically in batch form. Please allow sufficient time for your data to appear.

If you find any errors in this data, please let us know via email at: [email protected] .

Acknowledgements

This project is supported by Physics graduate students Kai Shinbrough and Jacqueline Acres , both of whom are members of the APS Student Ambassadors program and the APS Forum on Graduate Student Affairs (FGSA).

If you are interested in getting involved with this project, please contact us through [email protected] , or join the APS Student Ambassadors .

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How much did you make as a fresh physics phd graduate how much do you make now.

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Salary and stipend rates

Mit strives to offer salaries and stipends that enable students to live and pursue their education in cambridge and the greater boston area..

The base salary rates (RA/TA/IG appointments) are established by the collective bargaining agreement (cba) between MIT and the MIT Graduate Student Union . These rates only serve as a guideline to base salary pay; what a department may offer when providing a funding package can vary. Departments have the freedom to set higher rates that are in line with their funding policies for MIT appointments and external fellowships.

Fellowships are funding awards that cover some or all of the costs of graduate tuition, a stipend to cover living expenses, and student health insurance. Some departments offer fellowships to incoming students, and these rates are set in alignment with appointment salary rates. Additionally, MIT offers  grants for graduate students with dependent children  and other sources of support . 

MIT doctoral programs typically provide 12-month appointments; details on funding are outlined in graduate student offer letters. For students in 12-month programs who have a 9-month funding appointment, it is very important that you check with your department or program about opportunities for summer support, since nine months of support is typically insufficient to cover living expenses in the area.

12-month base salary and stipend rates (2024-2025)

Salaries, stipends, payroll, and taxes

All students are paid via MITPay, with the first payment typically disbursed during the second week of the term. Please see payroll information for graduate students for more information.

The salary or stipend is only part of the financial picture for supporting graduate students. Depending on award or appointment type, there are different costs to MIT and/or external sponsors. In all cases, MIT pays a substantial fraction of the tuition for students with research assistantships, teaching assistantships, and fellowships. MIT also subsidizes the graduate student housing system and the cost of health care.

Payments received from MIT may be subject to  withholding tax  in accordance with regulations governed by U.S. federal and state tax authorities. To learn more about how common payment types are defined by the IRS, and details about tax withholding and reporting, please visit the  Office of the Vice President for Finance (VPF) website .

The MIT International Students Office (ISO) and MIT VPF host a series of tax information workshops each spring for both U.S. and international students. More information can be found on the  workshops page .

Useful links: 

Office of Sponsored Programs – Graduate Research Assistant Tuition Subsidy Rates

Historic Stipend Levels

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