Urban and Regional Planners 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 Urban and Regional Planners ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $66,210. 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

With 43,040 jobs nationally, Urban and Regional Planners make up 0.03% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 7,630 of those jobs, the top three states hold 30.5%, and the deepest concentration sits in Alaska (location quotient 3.01, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $72,960 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($128,550) is 2.3 times the 10th percentile ($55,590), a gap of $72,960 a year. The mean of $89,730 sitting above the median of $83,720 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

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 $129,750; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Urban and Regional Planners stands number 413 by employment and number 189 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 1% less than its group median, and it supplies 3.0% of the group's 1,446,780 jobs. In 15 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $83,720, 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 1,980 jobs, 4.6% 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, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $81,810 a year, against $129,740 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

The median annual wage of $83,720 works out to $6,977 a month before taxes, $3,220 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,610 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($66,210) to the 75th ($104,450) is worth $38,240 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 $92,092 would sit between the median ($83,720) and the 75th percentile ($104,450), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $66,210, is $17,510 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

Sibling occupations in Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations: Physical Scientists, All Other, Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers, Physicists, Microbiologists, Forensic Science Technicians, Psychologists, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.