Forest and Conservation Technicians 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 Forest and Conservation Technicians ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $42,560. 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

BLS counted 31,080 Forest and Conservation Technicians jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Montana, where the location quotient is 18.85, meaning the occupation holds 18.85 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 6,440 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 36.4% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $80,790, which is 2.2 times the $36,190 at the 10th, a difference of $44,600 annually. Because the mean wage ($56,660) sits above the median ($54,310), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 6,440 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Maryland would lead at $67,450. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Forest and Conservation Technicians stands number 475 by employment and number 476 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations, the group median wage is $84,150 across 48 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 35% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.1% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 8 of the 43 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $54,310, 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

Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom, CA is the largest metro employer with 610 jobs, 2.0% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $60,080 a year, against $69,150 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,526 a month before tax, $2,089 biweekly, $1,044 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($42,560) to the 75th ($66,020) is worth $23,460 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 $59,741 would sit between the median ($54,310) and the 75th percentile ($66,020), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $42,560, is $11,750 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Anthropologists and Archeologists, Survey Researchers, Life Scientists, All Other, Nuclear Technicians, Political Scientists, Hydrologists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.