Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers worker at that point in the distribution, so $45,870 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 943,430, or 0.61% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 103,570 jobs; the top three states sum to 27.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Hawaii posts a location quotient of 1.86, 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: $35,250 at the 25th percentile, $38,090 at the middle, $45,870 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $23,910, a ratio of 1.8 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

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $47,320; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers stands number 36 by employment and number 740 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations, the group median wage is $44,730 across 10 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 15% less than its group median, and it supplies 21.0% of the group's 4,496,160 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $38,090, 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 49,250 jobs, 5.2% 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, Ponce, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $21,160 a year, against $53,560 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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

The median Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers paycheck, gross, is $1,465 every two weeks on an annual $38,090, which is $3,174 a month and $732 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,250) to the 75th ($45,870) is worth $10,620 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 $41,899 would sit between the median ($38,090) and the 75th percentile ($45,870), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,250, is $2,840 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations

Sibling occupations in Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations: First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers, Pest Control Workers, Tree Trimmers and Pruners, Pesticide Handlers, Sprayers, and Applicators, Vegetation, Building Cleaning Workers, All Other, Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.