The Scientist this month came out with its salary survey for the life sciences. It found salaries were on the rise in 2006, increasing 7.2 percent to a median of $74,000. Salaries in academia actually grew more than those in industry: 12.6 percent in academia compared with 9.6 percent in industry. Even entry-level salaries rose by 8.3 percent.

Other highlights:
Average salaries by job title
Postdocs: $40K
Tenure-track assistant professors: $77K

Average postdoc salaries by metro areas
Seattle: $47K
San Francisco: $45K
Boston: $42K
New York: $41K
This map gives cost of living estimates by metro area. Boston is #3 (about double the national average) after San Francisco and New York in housing costs.

Average salaries by specialization
Those PhDs in drug discovery, biotech, and pharmacology are doing the best, pulling in six figure salaries. On the low end are the microbiologists at $67K.

No surprise, “women, especially at the PhD level, made significantly less (>20K)”:http://www.the-scientist.com/supplementary/html/25289/gender.html than their male counterparts. And blacks, Hispanics and Asians also earned less than whites.