Occupation / job
Cartographers and Photogrammetrists
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
$81,390 is $2,614 a month above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Differences of that size in Cartographers and Photogrammetrists are held in place by a barrier — a licence, a residency, a clearance — and the barrier is the real subject of this page.
Employment as Cartographers and Photogrammetrists is 14,260 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.
Architecture, surveying and cartography suit people who think in space and can hold a design against a code, a boundary or a survey that does not negotiate.
How long it takes to become one of the 14,260 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
A quarter earn below $65,670 and a quarter above $101,960: a 1.6x ratio, $36,290 between the ends. That is an ordinary working spread, which also means experience and location explain most of it and there is no shortcut through the middle.
The bottom quarter of Cartographers and Photogrammetrists earns $65,670 or more — $15,650 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Three quarters of the field is well paid and the last quarter is still paid better than most of the country.
Avoid it if you dislike being constrained by code, boundary and client budget — those three decide most of what gets built.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 14,260 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
At 1.6x between $65,670 and $101,960 this is a normally shaped occupation. $81,390 is what the middle of Cartographers and Photogrammetrists earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
Put in money rather than ratios: $65,670 at the 25th percentile, $81,390 at the midpoint, $101,960 at the 75th. $36,290 separates the quarter of Cartographers and Photogrammetrists at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $65,670 and $101,960 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $81,390. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $20,570; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $36,290.
From $81,390 it is $15,720 down to the bottom quarter and $20,570 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Cartographers and Photogrammetrists is $39.12 an hour. The quarters sit at $31.57 and $49.01, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $81,390 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.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $81,390 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else