Tree Trimmers and Pruners Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($37,660) to the 90th ($78,900). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 47,870, or 0.03% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 8,620 jobs; the top three states sum to 28.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: West Virginia posts a location quotient of 6.21, 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: $43,690 at the 25th percentile, $50,430 at the middle, $63,130 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $41,240, a ratio of 2.1 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 8,620 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $84,740. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Tree Trimmers and Pruners stands number 396 by employment and number 515 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 13% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.1% of the group's 4,496,160 jobs. In 17 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $50,430, 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 2,420 jobs, 5.1% 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $41,300 a year, against $78,240 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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: $4,202 a month before tax, $1,940 biweekly, $970 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($43,690) to the 75th ($63,130) is worth $19,440 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 $55,473 would sit between the median ($50,430) and the 75th percentile ($63,130), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $43,690, is $6,740 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: First-Line Supervisors of Housekeeping and Janitorial Workers, First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers, Pest Control Workers, Pesticide Handlers, Sprayers, and Applicators, Vegetation, Building Cleaning Workers, All Other, Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.