Occupation / job
Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other
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
Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other pays $46,860 where the typical job pays $50,020 — $1.51 an hour apart. That is close enough to average that the interesting numbers on this page are the percentiles, not the median.
Employment as Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other is 13,630 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.
Grounds work suits people who would rather be outdoors in bad weather than indoors under a light, and who can sustain physical effort over years rather than a season.
How long it takes to become one of the 13,630 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
$37,520 to $57,820 — 1.5x, or $1,691 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
A quarter of Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other earn under $37,520, which is $12,500 short of the $50,020 national midpoint. Assume you start there and check whether the arithmetic still works.
Avoid it if you cannot sustain physical work outdoors in bad weather for years rather than a season.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 13,630 figure counts people already working as Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other, 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 $37,520 and $57,820 this is a normally shaped occupation. $46,860 is what the middle of Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other 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: $37,520 at the 25th percentile, $46,860 at the midpoint, $57,820 at the 75th. $20,300 separates the quarter of Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $37,520 and $57,820 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $46,860. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $10,960; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $20,300.
From $46,860 it is $9,340 down to the bottom quarter and $10,960 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $22.52 at the midpoint for Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other, $18.03 at the 25th percentile and $27.79 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
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 Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $46,860 describes them.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $46,860 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