Occupation / job
Agricultural Inspectors
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
Agricultural Inspectors pays $49,940, effectively level with the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — $80 apart, which is inside the noise of a single year’s survey. Treat this as an average-paying occupation and decide it on everything else.
Employment as Agricultural Inspectors is 14,410 nationally. At that size a large city holds a working market and a small one holds almost none, so where you live changes the number of employers available to you by an order of magnitude.
Agricultural work suits people who accept weather, season and commodity prices as the terms of employment rather than as bad luck.
How long it takes to become one of the 14,410 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
$42,330 to $64,500 — 1.5x, or $1,847 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Agricultural Inspectors is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
A quarter of Agricultural Inspectors earn less than $42,330, $7,690 off the $50,020 national midpoint — $20.35 an hour. The floor here is close enough to ordinary that the case against this work, if there is one, is not financial.
Avoid it if seasonal income and weather-dependent work would destabilise your household budget.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 14,410 figure counts people already working as Agricultural Inspectors, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.5x between $42,330 and $64,500 this is a normally shaped occupation. $49,940 is what the middle of Agricultural Inspectors earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
In cash terms the middle half of Agricultural Inspectors runs $42,330 to $64,500 — $22,170 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $49,940.
Getting to $64,500, the 75th percentile, is worth $14,560 a year more than the $49,940 midpoint and $22,170 more than the $42,330 a quarter of Agricultural Inspectors settle for.
From $49,940 the drop to $42,330 is $7,610 and the climb to $64,500 is $14,560. When the upper half of the range is that much longer, the average is pulled well above the median — which is exactly why this site publishes the median.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $24.00 at the midpoint for Agricultural Inspectors, $20.35 at the 25th percentile and $31.00 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $49,940 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
The hourly number on this page is $49,940 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Agricultural Inspectors, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else