Careers 2022

The diverse government sector of the US workforce—which includes positions at the federal, state, and local levels—employs a significant proportion of physicists in the US. There are roughly 58 000 physics PhDs in the country, as estimated by the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics. (AIP also publishes Physics Today.) Of those, about 10% are employed in government positions, according to data from the NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients. A substantial number of individuals whose highest physics degree is a bachelor’s or master’s also hold positions in government.

For a detailed look at physicists’ careers in government, we analyzed the initial employers of those who recently received a PhD, master’s, or bachelor’s degree in physics. The data come from surveys conducted by the Statistical Research Center. Of those surveyed who earned their PhD in 2019 or 2020 , 15% reported finding a job in the government: Eight percent of those who accepted potentially permanent positions after graduation and nearly a quarter of those who accepted postdoc positions did so with a government employer. The civilian government share of employers for newly minted physics bachelor’s degree holders that entered the workforce is 7%.

Government jobs span the country geographically, call for many skills that physicists are trained in, and offer competitive salaries. The interactive map above shows about three dozen frequently reported employers of recent physics graduates—those who received a PhD, master’s, or bachelor’s from 2015 to 2020—in the civilian federal government sector. (Government contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton, are not included.) National labs, including Los Alamos, Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley, and Argonne, are common destinations. NIST, with its popular postdoctoral program , also attracts many recent PhD graduates. Other physicists pursued civilian research at military research centers such as the Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Surface Warfare Center, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

The physicists surveyed in 2015–20 also disclosed the frequency—never/rarely, monthly, weekly, or daily—that they use certain common skills. Both recent PhD and bachelor’s holders working in government reported that they utilized teamwork and technical problem-solving skills most frequently. The interactive graphic below ranks frequently used skills in government jobs, based on the responses of 428 PhD recipients, 66 master’s holders, and 781 bachelor’s recipients.

Many government jobs offer research environments similar to those in academia paired with salaries that, while not quite at the level of the private sector, are often higher than those in academia. For example, in the 2019 and 2020 surveys, postdocs in academia earned between $36 000 and $79 000, whereas postdocs in government labs earned $50 000 to $99 000. For new physics bachelors, positions with the government offered the second-highest median salary, just behind private-sector positions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), as shown in the plot below.