Forest and Conservation Technicians
What the pay figures show
- North Dakota pays this job the most, at $68,600. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $64,368 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- North Dakota leads for forest and conservation technicians at $68,600 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $64,368 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$54,560
People doing it
30,410
Highest paid
$68,600
ND
Best off, really
$64,368
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$40,330
Highest tenth
$83,630
Lowest, really
$31,361
MO
States with data
45
National average
$59,060
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $31,361 up to $64,368.
- Only 30,410 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 45 jurisdictions, averaging $54,560 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. North Dakota leads the published set.
- The nominal spread for forest and conservation technicians approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $31,361 to $64,368, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in forest and conservation technicians is 30,410. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- Coverage for forest and conservation technicians runs to 45 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Forest and Conservation Technicians
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $40,330 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $54,560 |
| Top tenth earn over | $83,630 |
| This salary | $54,560 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Forest and Conservation Technicians
The national median for this job
$54,560around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $40,330 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $54,560 |
| Top tenth | $83,630 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Forest and Conservation Technicians, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Missouri · $33,920 |
|---|---|
| Highest | North Dakota · $68,600 |
| Spread | $34,680 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $52,200 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $53,718 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| ND | $68,600 | $57,012 | $64,368 |
| AK | $68,160 | $56,781 | $55,823 |
| LA | $59,370 | $48,489 | $54,886 |
| WI | $62,700 | $50,292 | $54,021 |
| SD | $54,770 | $46,188 | $52,429 |
| AL | $56,720 | $45,315 | $50,367 |
| AR | $53,290 | $43,485 | $50,267 |
| MD | $64,980 | $51,669 | $49,698 |
| WY | $53,290 | $44,999 | $49,532 |
| WV | $54,600 | $44,413 | $49,473 |
| OK | $53,930 | $43,586 | $49,370 |
| SC | $55,910 | $45,713 | $49,060 |
| MS | $52,420 | $42,295 | $48,452 |
| NM | $53,000 | $43,440 | $48,061 |
| IA | $52,000 | $42,598 | $47,988 |
| MN | $58,990 | $47,091 | $47,848 |
| PA | $57,370 | $46,516 | $47,708 |
| MT | $52,420 | $42,592 | $47,197 |
| NV | $54,230 | $45,754 | $47,179 |
| ID | $53,290 | $43,027 | $47,063 |
| NE | $51,630 | $42,019 | $46,494 |
| AZ | $56,660 | $46,692 | $46,182 |
| CO | $57,550 | $46,598 | $45,962 |
| VT | $54,160 | $44,139 | $45,676 |
| TX | $52,200 | $44,123 | $45,405 |
| OH | $48,840 | $40,796 | $44,435 |
| TN | $47,940 | $40,700 | $43,993 |
| IN | $48,660 | $39,872 | $43,253 |
| NY | $58,030 | $46,270 | $42,992 |
| FL | $52,420 | $44,299 | $42,821 |
| IL | $52,790 | $42,128 | $42,616 |
| GA | $50,710 | $40,994 | $42,393 |
| WA | $54,160 | $45,698 | $42,094 |
| NC | $48,360 | $39,616 | $42,083 |
| CA | $58,120 | $47,200 | $41,925 |
| MA | $56,480 | $45,058 | $41,628 |
| NH | $51,630 | $43,665 | $41,449 |
| OR | $55,910 | $42,762 | $40,834 |
| UT | $47,940 | $38,566 | $40,595 |
| VA | $49,960 | $40,211 | $39,912 |
| KY | $43,660 | $35,850 | $39,628 |
| MI | $45,760 | $37,254 | $39,555 |
| KS | $41,660 | $33,618 | $37,368 |
| HI | $50,040 | $40,018 | $36,846 |
| MO | $33,920 | $28,778 | $31,361 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $54,560 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for this job assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In North Dakota, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $57,012.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Missouri, on $31,361.
- All wage figures for forest and conservation technicians are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $54,560. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for forest and conservation technicians assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $57,012, in North Dakota. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for forest and conservation technicians rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Missouri anchors the distribution at $31,361. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.