Landscape Architects Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Landscape Architects worker at that point in the distribution, so $101,580 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

With 19,580 jobs nationally, Landscape Architects make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 2,820 of those jobs, the top three states hold 28.0%, and the deepest concentration sits in Colorado (location quotient 2.22, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $51,990 or less, and one in ten earns $132,250 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.5 to 1 and the annual gap is $80,260. The mean ($88,000) versus median ($79,660) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 47 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $100,110; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Landscape Architects stands number 567 by employment and number 212 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 18% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 17 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $79,660, 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 800 jobs, 4.1% 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, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $78,960 a year, against $132,340 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $6,638 a month before tax, $3,064 biweekly, $1,532 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($62,650) to the 75th ($101,580) is worth $38,930 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 $87,626 would sit between the median ($79,660) and the 75th percentile ($101,580), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $62,650, is $17,010 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

Sibling occupations in Architecture and Engineering Occupations: Drafters, All Other, Calibration Technologists and Technicians, Nuclear Engineers, Electro-Mechanical and Mechatronics Technologists and Technicians, Cartographers and Photogrammetrists, Environmental Engineering Technologists and Technicians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.