What City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning Graduates Earn

Median earnings at 1, 4, and 5 years (College Scorecard)

The three rows below are the whole earnings story Scorecard can tell about City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning: $55,101, then $68,163, then $74,002. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 13 programs at year one and 14 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

Earnings in this field climb $18,901 between the first and fifth year, a 34% rise that beats the all-fields pattern (the median field in this dataset pays $45,010 at year one and $65,763 at year five). Early-career growth this shape usually means the first job is a foothold: licensure, a portfolio, or a first promotion does the heavy lifting.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $55,101 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $54,795, and graduates who did not earn $57,781, a gap of $2,986. Read it as a map of where each group studied and the networks they carried in, not as the degree paying two different wages for the same work.

Inside its own CIP family, City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning ranks 2 of 4 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $71,657. Its closest sibling is Architectural Sciences and Technology at $76,256, above this field's $74,002. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning stands number 67 by five-year earnings and number 61 by first-year earnings, and number 57 from the lowest median debt. Those three ranks together are the field's fingerprint: high earn rank with a low debt rank is the combination students are actually shopping for, and this field's spread between them is 10 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Across the 12 programs that report debt for City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning, the median graduate owes $19,546. Set beside the $55,101 year-one median, the debt is 35% of first-year gross earnings, about 4.3 months of pay before tax. Repaid on the standard 10-year schedule at 6.52%, it costs $222 monthly and $7,111 in interest. The student loan payoff calculator replays that schedule with your numbers, and the college ROI calculator weighs the full cost against the earnings table above.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $74,002 five-year figure. The table ranks the reporting programs by their five-year median, keeping only programs with at least 30 graduates in that count so a tiny cohort cannot top the list by luck. University of Arizona leads it at $81,493.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of University of Arizona's counted graduates earn less than $81,493. Weigh any program here against its own price using the net price estimator and the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 55.4% of the 601 graduates counted at five years, so the top of the table is a thin slice and not the field's center; and the leading program's five-year median of $81,493 sits 10% above the national field median of $74,002. Its median debt, $21,875, runs above the field median of $19,546, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.