EXPOSED
The paperwork core of this job — meal plan generation, calorie and macronutrient calculations, diet education handouts, food-log analysis, charting — is already handled competently by apps and LLMs, and consumers increasingly get 'good enough' nutrition guidance free. What holds is licensed medical nutrition therapy: bedside assessment of a malnourished or dysphagic patient, enteral/parenteral feeding orders, adjusting nutrition for renal failure or short-gut syndrome, and being the credentialed name in the chart. Modal worker here is a clinical or community RD, and the split is sharp — the wellness-coaching tier is far more exposed than the hospital tier.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $61,270 → $76,400 -0.2% 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
+5.5%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 77,570 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +5.5% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 65/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
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.
~6,200 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
DietistDieticianDietitianDietary AideFood AdvisorMenu PlannerNutritionistDiet CounselorDiet TherapistDiet ConsultantFood ConsultantRenal DietitianClinical DieticianClinical DietitianOncology DietitianResearch DietitianTeaching DietitianCommunity DietitianNutrition CounselorPediatric DieticianSports NutritionistConsultant DietitianNutrition ConsultantOutpatient Dietitian
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: task resistance .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier An 11 reflects the actual split in a clinical RD's day: exchange-list meal plans, nutrient calculations, food-log review and patient handouts are already generated by software, while the parts that don't digitise — physically assessing muscle wasting and fat loss for ASPEN/AND malnutrition criteria, watching a stroke patient swallow, palpating edema before interpreting a weight, titrating TPN against daily labs — are genuine but constitute a minority of billable time for most postholders.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments 13 is set by the bedside portion: nutrition-focused physical exam means putting hands on temples, clavicles and calves, checking a PEG site, inspecting oral intake and tray returns, and doing it on inpatient units, in nursing homes, in WIC clinics and in school kitchens during HACCP checks — uncontrolled settings you cannot substitute with a video call, though you are not lifting patients or operating equipment.
Licensed human required and personally liable 13 is right because the RDN credential plus state licensure in most states makes you the one who writes the nutrition diagnosis and, under CMS order-writing privileges granted by hospital protocol, signs enteral and parenteral orders in your own name — but a physician still countersigns in many facilities and the diet-order privilege is delegated rather than independent, which keeps this below the surgeon-or-pharmacist tier.
Meaningful discretion 13 fits the calls you actually own: deciding whether a short-gut or refeeding-risk patient advances, how much protein a patient on CRRT gets, whether a dysphagic patient can take thin liquids, and when to recommend against a feeding tube — high-stakes and ambiguous, but bounded by ASPEN and KDOQI guidelines and made inside a team where the physician holds final authority.
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 (11/20 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 (13/20) 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 (13/20) 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 41 of this occupation's 65 points (63%).
Embodiment (13/20) 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.
Physical Therapists SAFE
Physician Assistants SAFE
Chiropractors SAFE
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 80/100 — SAFE.
Task-mix shift as the wellness tier collapses: the split here is unusually sharp. If free apps absorb meal planning, food-log analysis and handout generation, the surviving job is dysphagia and malnutrition assessment (Nutrition-Focused Physical Exam, GLIM/ASPEN malnutrition criteria requiring hands-on muscle and fat wasting assessment), refeeding-syndrome management, and short-gut/renal titration — work AI cannot source data for without a bedside human. Score rises because the denominator shrinks, not because capability retreats; headcount likely falls alongside.
Wider adoption of Nutrition-Focused Physical Exam as a required, documented component of malnutrition diagnosis for coding and reimbursement (ASPEN/Academy push, and payer audit scrutiny of malnutrition DRGs after OIG reports on malnutrition upcoding). If auditors demand hands-on exam findings — grip strength, temporal and orbital fat assessment — the physical touch becomes the compliance artifact.
State licensure expansion for medical nutrition therapy with order-writing privileges: CMS already permits hospitals to grant RDs privileges to independently order therapeutic diets and enteral/parenteral nutrition (2014 CMS rule, 42 CFR 482.28). If more state boards and hospital medical staff bylaws convert that permission into a requirement that a credentialed RD sign TPN/tube-feeding orders — and if Medicare MNT coverage expands beyond diabetes/renal to obesity and cardiometabolic disease (repeatedly introduced as the Medical Nutrition Therapy Act, e.g. H.R.6407 lineage) — the signature becomes billable and legally necessary rather than optional.
CDR/ACEND scope enforcement against unlicensed 'nutritionist' and AI wellness-coaching products: state boards (Florida, Ohio, North Dakota have active nutrition practice acts) pursuing cease-and-desist actions against app-delivered individualized diet prescriptions for diagnosed conditions, or an FDA decision to regulate condition-specific diet-recommendation software as a medical device rather than exempt wellness software under the 21st Century Cures Act §3060 carve-out.
Formal RD membership on hospital nutrition support teams and ethics committees with documented authority over goals-of-care nutrition decisions — withdrawal of artificial nutrition in advanced dementia, feeding decisions in palliative care — where the call is contested and the RD's recommendation is named in the chart. Joint Commission nutrition screening standards already require the assessment; making the RD the accountable decision-maker rather than a consultant is a bylaws-level change.
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic upward route: the consumer-facing tier is where the willingness to pay for a human is concentrated, and that is exactly the tier being eroded by free apps and influencer content. Hospital patients do not choose their RD or pay for the credential directly. Note also that every liability lever here raises the score for the roughly half of the workforce in clinical settings while doing nothing for community and wellness practitioners; a rising score can coexist with falling headcount.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 5,490 | $86,690 +13% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 3,060 | $95,450 +25% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 2,150 | $74,860 -2% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 2,030 | $73,560 -4% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 2,000 | $77,840 +2% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 1,340 | $77,180 +1% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 1,320 | $77,540 +1% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 1,280 | $64,420 -16% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 610 | $122,910 +61% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 1,210 | $117,380 +54% |
| Vallejo, CA | 100 | $111,430 +46% |
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 65. 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.