Agricultural Inspectors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Agricultural Inspectors ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $42,740. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 12,090, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 2,120 jobs; the top three states sum to 28.9% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Wyoming posts a location quotient of 5.49, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $42,740 at the 25th percentile, $50,990 at the middle, $64,960 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $42,800, a ratio of 2.1 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 2,120 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Michigan would lead at $72,300. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Agricultural Inspectors stands number 662 by employment and number 507 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations, the group median wage is $46,710 across 13 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 9% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.7% of the group's 440,980 jobs. In 23 of the 43 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $50,990, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 560 jobs, 4.6% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $64,680 a year, against $64,680 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Agricultural Inspectors paycheck, gross, is $1,961 every two weeks on an annual $50,990, which is $4,249 a month and $981 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($42,740) to the 75th ($64,960) is worth $22,220 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $56,089 would sit between the median ($50,990) and the 75th percentile ($64,960), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $42,740, is $8,250 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: First-Line Supervisors of Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Workers, Graders and Sorters, Agricultural Products, Logging Equipment Operators, Forest and Conservation Workers, Agricultural Workers, All Other, Fallers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.