Occupation / job
Agricultural Technicians
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
At $49,630 against $50,020, Agricultural Technicians sits $0.18 an hour under the typical American job. A gap that small is not a reason to choose it or to rule it out; the spread and the entry cost are where the real decision is.
Employment as Agricultural Technicians is 15,130 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.
These roles suit people who want to be in the lab or the field without the grant-writing, and who take the craft of measurement seriously in its own right.
We carry no verified training length for Agricultural Technicians — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
$40,950 to $63,630 — 1.6x, or $1,890 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Agricultural Technicians is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
A quarter of Agricultural Technicians earn less than $40,950, $9,070 off the $50,020 national midpoint — $19.68 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 you want to set the research question; the technician role executes a protocol it did not choose.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 15,130 figure counts people already working as Agricultural Technicians, 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
1.6x between $40,950 and $63,630 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $49,630 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
Put in money rather than ratios: $40,950 at the 25th percentile, $49,630 at the midpoint, $63,630 at the 75th. $22,680 separates the quarter of Agricultural Technicians at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $63,630, the 75th percentile, is worth $14,000 a year more than the $49,630 midpoint and $22,680 more than the $40,950 a quarter of Agricultural Technicians settle for.
It is $8,680 from $49,630 down to $40,950 but $14,000 up to $63,630. When a range leans this far upward, the interesting question is what puts someone in the top half, because the money is disproportionately there.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Agricultural Technicians is $23.86 an hour. The quarters sit at $19.68 and $30.59, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Agricultural Technicians. The self-employed are excluded, so $49,630 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $49,630 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Agricultural Technicians, 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