Surveyors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Surveyors offer sit among all 53,080 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 53,080 people in May 2024, 0.03% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 7,530 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 29.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Alaska, whose location quotient of 2.61 says this work is 2.61 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $72,650 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($116,330) is 2.7 times the 10th percentile ($43,680), a gap of $72,650 a year. The mean of $76,730 sitting above the median of $72,740 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 7,530 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $103,790. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Surveyors stands number 382 by employment and number 269 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 25% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.1% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 27 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $72,740, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 2,300 jobs, 4.3% 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 Antonio-New Braunfels, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $62,280 a year, against $128,350 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 annual wage of $72,740 works out to $6,062 a month before taxes, $2,798 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,399 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($53,590) to the 75th ($94,550) is worth $40,960 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $80,014 would sit between the median ($72,740) and the 75th percentile ($94,550), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $53,590, is $19,150 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: 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, Agricultural Engineers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.