SAFE
Audiologists spend their days placing probes and inserts in real ears, performing otoscopy and cerumen management, running real-ear verification on hearing aids, taking earmold impressions, and running vestibular and ABR testing on patients who can't always cooperate — none of which a language model touches. Automated audiometry, tablet-based screening, and self-fitting OTC hearing aids do erode the routine pure-tone-and-sell tier, and AI already drafts reports and reads tympanograms competently. The AuD license, state scope-of-practice rules, and personal liability for diagnosis and referral (acoustic neuroma, sudden hearing loss) keep the human in the chair — a regulatory shield that could narrow if OTC and telehealth rules loosen further.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $77,600 → $95,780 -1.3% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+9.5%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 13,660 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Hard to automate, and growing
The work resists current AI and the BLS projects +9.5% more of these jobs by 2034. Note that safe does not mean well paid — several of the fastest-growing resistant occupations are among the lowest paid on the register.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~700 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
AudiologistAudiology ExternHearing TherapistStaff AudiologistClinical AudiologistForensic AudiologistLicensed AudiologistPediatric AudiologistAudiology Doctor (AUD)Dispensing AudiologistIndustrial AudiologistEducational AudiologistCertificate of Clinical Competence in Audiology Licensed Audiologist (CCC-A Licensed Audiologist)
Holding it up: liability shield . Weakest point: task resistance .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Automated pure-tone audiometry, tablet-based screening, and self-fitting OTC aids genuinely absorb the routine air/bone threshold-and-fit visit that fills a large share of a community clinic's schedule, and AI drafts audiogram interpretations and tympanogram reads well enough to be useful — but ABR/ASSR on a sedated infant, VNG with caloric irrigation, cerumen removal under otoscopy, and real-ear probe-tube verification still require a clinician at the chair, which is what holds this at 12 rather than the mid-teens.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Practically every billable procedure involves your hands in or on a patient's head — inserting foam tips and probe tubes, syringing or curetting wax, injecting silicone for earmold impressions, placing electrodes for ABR, strapping a patient into a rotary chair — in noisy schools, NICUs, nursing homes, and sound booths rather than a fixed lab bench, which is why this sits at 14 and not the 8-10 of a screen-plus-occasional-exam role.
Licensed human required and personally liable Every state licenses audiologists, and the AuD holder personally signs the diagnostic report, owns the decision to refer red flags like unilateral asymmetry, sudden sensorineural loss, or retrocochlear findings to ENT, and is the billing provider of record for CPT 92557/92585 — the 16 rather than 19 reflects that OTC hearing aids and expanding telehealth rules have already carved routine amplification out from under that licence.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls Deciding whether an asymmetric threshold pattern warrants MRI, whether a 2-year-old's inconsistent behavioral responses are real thresholds or fatigue, whether to trust a VNG result that contradicts the patient's history, and whether a cochlear implant candidate will actually benefit — all made on ambiguous data with the consequence of a missed acoustic neuroma or a lost year of language development.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (12/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (16/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (15/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 45 of this occupation's 71 points (63%).
Embodiment (14/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 79/100, still SAFE.
Task-mix shift: as automated pure-tone screening and OTC fitting absorb the simple sensorineural-loss-and-amplification tier, the remaining caseload concentrates in vestibular assessment (VNG, vHIT, VEMP), ABR/ASSR on infants and non-cooperative patients, tinnitus and hyperacusis management, cochlear implant mapping, and intraoperative neuromonitoring — all requiring physical probe placement, patient conditioning, and real-time interpretation. Universal newborn hearing screening referrals and expanding CI eligibility criteria feed this tier directly.
State boards or FDA guidance requiring a licensed audiologist to review and sign off on outputs from OTC self-fitting hearing aids and app-based audiometry when a red-flag condition (unilateral loss, sudden loss, otalgia, drainage) is flagged — i.e. mandatory referral gatekeeping written into the OTC rule rather than left as a consumer checkbox. Also cochlear implant candidacy and programming remaining an explicitly licensed act in state scope-of-practice statutes, and Medicare's move toward direct-access audiology (proposed MAAIA / Medicare Audiology Access Improvement Act) which would place diagnostic responsibility squarely on the AuD rather than a referring physician.
Growth in the share of work that is procedural: cerumen management under video otoscopy, earmold and custom impression taking, intraoperative monitoring in the OR, and CI device troubleshooting on the patient. If state scope expands to include more cerumen removal and minor procedures (as several states have done), the physical-manipulation fraction of the day rises.
Ownership of the differential-diagnosis call under ambiguity — deciding whether an asymmetric threshold pattern warrants urgent MRI for acoustic neuroma or same-week steroids for sudden sensorineural loss. If direct-access billing removes the physician intermediary, the audiologist becomes the sole accountable decision-maker for that referral, and missed-diagnosis malpractice exposure attaches to them.
The limit. Trust premium has no strong upward route: hearing aid purchasing is increasingly price-driven and retail/big-box and OTC channels compete on convenience, not on wanting a human. The pediatric and vestibular segments already carry whatever premium exists.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 530 | $115,070 +20% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 520 | $128,110 +34% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 390 | $83,200 -13% |
| Cleveland, OH | 300 | $80,640 -16% |
| Columbus, OH | 260 | $75,400 -21% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 250 | $91,970 -4% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 230 | $100,930 +5% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 230 | $114,730 +20% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 70 | $133,910 +40% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 220 | $132,390 +38% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 170 | $128,350 +34% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 71. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.