Urban and Regional Planners
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays urban and regional planners the most, at $137,000. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $86,846 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- The District of Columbia leads for urban and regional planners at $137,000 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $86,846 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
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$89,320
People doing it
44,230
Highest paid
$137,000
DC
Best off, really
$86,846
DC, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$60,010
Highest tenth
$134,490
Lowest, really
$53,241
DE
States with data
51
National average
$94,750
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
110.8%
DC, 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 $53,241 up to $86,846.
- Only 44,230 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $89,320. Nothing is missing.
- The nominal spread for urban and regional planners approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $53,241 to $86,846, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in urban and regional planners is 44,230. ⚠️ 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 urban and regional planners is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Urban and Regional Planners
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $60,010 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $89,320 |
| Top tenth earn over | $134,490 |
| This salary | $89,320 |
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 Urban and Regional Planners
The national median for this job
$89,320around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $60,010 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $89,320 |
| Top tenth | $134,490 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Urban and Regional Planners, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $60,300 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $137,000 |
| Spread | $76,700 |
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 | $82,830 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $85,238 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC | $137,000 | $96,229 | $86,846 |
| NV | $100,040 | $79,208 | $81,675 |
| AZ | $102,400 | $78,711 | $77,851 |
| CO | $101,340 | $76,372 | $75,331 |
| AK | $93,860 | $74,861 | $73,598 |
| WA | $100,990 | $79,876 | $73,577 |
| MN | $97,060 | $72,035 | $73,194 |
| ND | $78,500 | $63,783 | $72,013 |
| CT | $99,880 | $74,352 | $71,707 |
| OK | $81,520 | $63,011 | $71,372 |
| CA | $109,610 | $79,839 | $70,917 |
| IA | $79,100 | $62,083 | $69,939 |
| TN | $78,970 | $64,385 | $69,595 |
| OR | $103,070 | $72,871 | $69,586 |
| IL | $91,360 | $68,724 | $69,520 |
| KS | $82,330 | $62,444 | $69,409 |
| WI | $84,290 | $64,579 | $69,367 |
| OH | $79,950 | $63,593 | $69,264 |
| MT | $80,770 | $62,449 | $69,200 |
| TX | $82,830 | $67,101 | $69,052 |
| MA | $99,780 | $74,356 | $68,697 |
| MO | $80,720 | $62,760 | $68,394 |
| RI | $90,210 | $69,330 | $68,365 |
| UT | $84,360 | $64,423 | $67,813 |
| NM | $77,710 | $61,012 | $67,502 |
| VT | $84,750 | $64,969 | $67,231 |
| LA | $74,500 | $59,392 | $67,227 |
| NC | $81,230 | $63,243 | $67,180 |
| SD | $71,180 | $58,905 | $66,865 |
| NE | $74,830 | $58,772 | $65,030 |
| ID | $76,500 | $59,447 | $65,022 |
| PA | $80,810 | $63,199 | $64,819 |
| MI | $78,510 | $60,976 | $64,741 |
| MD | $88,570 | $67,296 | $64,729 |
| VA | $86,030 | $65,166 | $64,682 |
| WY | $70,190 | $58,209 | $64,073 |
| GA | $80,030 | $61,736 | $63,844 |
| SC | $75,810 | $59,452 | $63,805 |
| FL | $80,720 | $65,617 | $63,427 |
| NY | $89,630 | $67,637 | $62,844 |
| ME | $79,120 | $60,470 | $62,278 |
| AL | $70,710 | $55,540 | $61,732 |
| IN | $70,760 | $56,552 | $61,347 |
| NJ | $86,280 | $66,222 | $60,819 |
| AR | $63,530 | $51,334 | $59,341 |
| HI | $85,590 | $63,981 | $58,909 |
| KY | $65,000 | $52,250 | $57,755 |
| NH | $73,860 | $60,791 | $57,706 |
| MS | $60,300 | $48,311 | $55,344 |
| WV | $61,390 | $49,582 | $55,231 |
| DE | $67,110 | $52,844 | $53,241 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of urban and regional planners earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $89,320.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for urban and regional planners, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is the District of Columbia, at $96,229.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for urban and regional planners. 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 Delaware, on $53,241.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for urban and regional planners, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $89,320, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Retained-pay figures for urban and regional planners model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $96,229, which leads in the District of Columbia.
- Real-terms results for urban and regional planners 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; Delaware anchors the distribution at $53,241. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.