Is optometry school worth it?
The answer
It pays for itself in about 5.7 years
Optometry school costs about $231,074 over 4 years. The median optometrists earns $136,570, against $79,084 for a bachelor’s-degree holder — an increase of $57,486 a year before tax.
How that is worked out
What it costs
$231,074
- Tuition and fees a year
- $43,753
- Living costs a year
- $14,016
- Years
- 4
Median across the 24 schools whose per-programme price we hold. In-state where a school charges differently.
What the work pays
$136,570
- Bottom 10%
- $74,870
- Median
- $136,570
- Top 10%
- $202,180
Pay for Optometrists. This is what people in that work earn, not what everyone who finishes the degree earns.
What it adds
+$57,486/yr
- With the degree
- $136,570
- Bachelor’s median
- $79,084
- After tax, roughly
- $40,240
We count 70% of the increase as reaching your pocket. An approximation, not a tax calculation.
What this figure leaves out
- The pay you give up while studying. 4 years out of full-time work is roughly $316,336 of earnings not banked. Counting it moves payback well beyond the figure above.
- Interest. The cost shown is what the degree costs, not what borrowing it costs. Grad PLUS ended for new borrowers on 1 July 2026, so anything above the federal cap is private borrowing.
- Whether you end up in the work. The pay figure describes people employed as optometrists. It does not describe someone who finishes the degree and does something else.
- A small sample. Only 24 schools report a price for this programme, so the median moves more than it would for a larger field.
Where these numbers come from
- Tuition
- IPEDS, with per-programme tuition from the professional associations where they publish it. Living costs are each school’s own published figure.
- Pay
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics — Optometrists, national.
- The comparison salary
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, 2024 one-year release: median earnings of bachelor’s-degree holders working full time year round, aged 22 to 65 (ACS PUMS 2024). Federal rules measure graduate programmes against a bachelor’s-holder median, but the Department of Education has published no figures for it, so we compute our own and say so.