One of the most visited pages at the American Association of Science's website is called salary survey. Actually it is about more than salaries, showing how PhDs from 14 disciplines compare in the job market. Physicists come out well in the survey, having nearly the lowest unemployment level at 2 per cent, as well as comparatively high salaries.

The median salary for a PhD physicist in business/industry is US$62,000; the median for government work is $63,000. This compares with $72,500 and nearly $55,000, respectively, for computer scientists in business/industry and government.

Figure 1: Options: areas of work of UK physics graduates surveyed in 1996.
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SOURCE: HESA

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Nevertheless, economists beat both physicists and computer scientists, with a median starting salary of $73,500 in business/industry, a figure which might explain the attraction some physicists feel for Wall Street and the City of London (see page 267).

In the United Kingdom, the Institute of Physics carries out a salary survey every two years. In 1998, the median salary across all sectors and levels of qualification was £27,850 ($45,000), an increase of 5 per cent compared with 1996. The highest-paid jobs were in industry. The median salary in the chemical and petrochemical industry, for example, was £37,500. In telecommunications and electronics, the median was £35,500.

Academic physicists, however, will have to find the intellectual challenge enough in itself — their salaries being below those in industry and other fields. Median salaries for those in universities were £28,000 and for those in research laboratories £26,173.