Surveyors
What the pay figures show
- California comes first for surveyors on every measure. $105,330 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $77,534 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For surveyors, California's $105,330 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $77,534. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$75,440
People doing it
50,830
Highest paid
$105,330
CA
Best off, really
$77,534
AK, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$46,880
Highest tenth
$125,590
Lowest, really
$48,152
GA
States with data
50
National average
$80,570
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.72%
AK, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $48,152 to $77,534.
- This is a small job: about 50,830 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $75,440. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, California pays most.
- Interstate variation in surveyors pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $48,152 to $77,534, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 50,830 workers, surveyors is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for surveyors in 50 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Surveyors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $46,880 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $75,440 |
| Top tenth earn over | $125,590 |
| This salary | $75,440 |
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 Surveyors
The national median for this job
$75,440around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $46,880 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $75,440 |
| Top tenth | $125,590 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Surveyors, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $51,800 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $105,330 |
| Spread | $53,530 |
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 | $61,150 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $62,928 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AK | $99,550 | $78,863 | $77,534 |
| ND | $79,360 | $64,371 | $72,677 |
| WY | $81,250 | $65,989 | $72,637 |
| MT | $84,610 | $64,934 | $71,953 |
| SD | $77,190 | $63,133 | $71,665 |
| NV | $82,460 | $66,841 | $68,922 |
| CA | $105,330 | $77,226 | $68,596 |
| IN | $80,510 | $63,123 | $68,475 |
| IA | $77,090 | $60,745 | $68,432 |
| TN | $76,340 | $62,535 | $67,595 |
| WI | $79,650 | $61,590 | $66,157 |
| OR | $97,070 | $69,175 | $66,057 |
| MA | $94,590 | $70,965 | $65,563 |
| NM | $74,230 | $58,728 | $64,974 |
| ME | $83,200 | $63,055 | $64,940 |
| KS | $75,860 | $58,253 | $64,751 |
| MN | $83,620 | $63,494 | $64,515 |
| NC | $76,210 | $59,912 | $63,642 |
| WA | $85,610 | $69,057 | $63,610 |
| DE | $82,890 | $62,903 | $63,377 |
| ID | $73,940 | $57,781 | $63,201 |
| KY | $71,840 | $56,973 | $62,975 |
| OH | $70,620 | $57,285 | $62,394 |
| VT | $76,450 | $59,677 | $61,755 |
| PA | $75,950 | $59,929 | $61,466 |
| AZ | $77,490 | $61,809 | $61,134 |
| CO | $79,310 | $61,843 | $61,000 |
| MI | $72,080 | $56,726 | $60,229 |
| NE | $68,050 | $54,310 | $60,094 |
| UT | $73,230 | $57,089 | $60,092 |
| IL | $75,980 | $58,666 | $59,345 |
| AL | $66,840 | $52,969 | $58,874 |
| LA | $63,140 | $51,405 | $58,187 |
| CT | $76,730 | $59,339 | $57,228 |
| HI | $82,200 | $61,854 | $56,951 |
| NY | $78,870 | $60,653 | $56,355 |
| OK | $61,300 | $49,177 | $55,701 |
| NJ | $77,160 | $60,387 | $55,460 |
| WV | $61,520 | $49,681 | $55,341 |
| VA | $71,070 | $55,502 | $55,089 |
| SC | $63,300 | $51,160 | $54,907 |
| MO | $62,110 | $50,104 | $54,602 |
| MS | $58,720 | $47,105 | $53,962 |
| FL | $65,480 | $54,793 | $52,965 |
| TX | $61,150 | $51,314 | $52,806 |
| NH | $65,130 | $54,512 | $51,746 |
| RI | $62,670 | $50,605 | $49,901 |
| MD | $64,910 | $51,616 | $49,647 |
| AR | $51,800 | $42,343 | $48,947 |
| GA | $58,100 | $46,563 | $48,152 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for surveyors as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $75,440, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- Take-home figures for surveyors 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 Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $78,863.
- The price adjustment for surveyors uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — Georgia anchors the bottom at $48,152. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for surveyors, with a national value of $75,440. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for surveyors 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 $78,863, in Alaska. 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 figures for surveyors deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.