Architects, Except Landscape and Naval Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Architects, Except Landscape and Naval worker at that point in the distribution, so $123,300 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 111,140, or 0.07% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 13,880 jobs; the top three states sum to 29.5% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: District of Columbia posts a location quotient of 2.62, 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: $76,110 at the 25th percentile, $96,690 at the middle, $123,300 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $99,290, a ratio of 2.6 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 13,880 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $114,480. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Architects, Except Landscape and Naval stands number 250 by employment and number 143 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Architecture and Engineering Occupations, the group median wage is $96,690 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 4.3% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 21 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $96,690, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 10,800 jobs, 9.7% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $55,480 a year, against $152,210 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $8,058 a month before tax, $3,719 biweekly, $1,859 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($76,110) to the 75th ($123,300) is worth $47,190 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $106,359 would sit between the median ($96,690) and the 75th percentile ($123,300), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $76,110, is $20,580 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Architecture and Engineering Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Electro-Mechanical and Mechatronics Technologists and Technicians, Cartographers and Photogrammetrists, Environmental Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians, Marine Engineers and Naval Architects, Mining and Geological Engineers, Including Mining Safety Engineers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.