Occupation / job
Foresters
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
A midpoint of $76,400 against $50,020 means Foresters pays $2,198 a month more than the typical American job. At that distance the entry requirement is the real subject, because it is what the premium is buying.
10,430 people work as Foresters. That is enough for a functioning national market and not enough for a functioning local one — in most metros this is a few employers rather than a field you can move around inside.
This work suits people patient enough to let an experiment take the time it takes, in a field where the interesting result is usually years behind the interesting question.
How long it takes to become one of the 10,430 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
The middle half runs $62,710 to $91,640 — $2,410 a month between the quarters, a 1.5x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.
The bottom quarter of Foresters earns $62,710 or more — $12,690 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 a career built on renewable funding would be too precarious for your circumstances.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 10,430 figure counts people already working as Foresters, 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
$62,710 to $91,640 is a 1.5x range. Ranges this tight usually mean the employer set is homogeneous — the same kind of organisation paying the same kind of scale — so the lever you have is geography rather than employer.
Put in money rather than ratios: $62,710 at the 25th percentile, $76,400 at the midpoint, $91,640 at the 75th. $28,930 separates the quarter of Foresters at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $91,640, the 75th percentile, is worth $15,240 a year more than the $76,400 midpoint and $28,930 more than the $62,710 a quarter of Foresters settle for.
$76,400 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $13,690 above the bottom quarter, $15,240 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Foresters is $36.73 an hour. The quarters sit at $30.14 and $44.05, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Foresters for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $76,400 describes them.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $76,400 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