Occupation / job
Landscape Architects
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 $79,870 against $50,020 means Landscape Architects pays $2,487 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.
Employment as Landscape Architects is 19,600 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.
No verified preparation time is on file for Landscape Architects. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
$64,170 to $104,090 — 1.6x, or $3,326 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Landscape Architects is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
Even the bottom quarter of Landscape Architects earns $64,170 — $30.85 an hour and $14,150 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Very little of this distribution is badly paid.
Avoid it if you dislike being constrained by code, boundary and client budget — those three decide most of what gets built.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 19,600 people employed as Landscape Architects; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
1.6x between $64,170 and $104,090 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $79,870 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
The middle half of this field earns between $64,170 and $104,090. That is $39,920 of range, with $79,870 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $104,090, the 75th percentile, is worth $24,220 a year more than the $79,870 midpoint and $39,920 more than the $64,170 a quarter of Landscape Architects settle for.
The climb from $79,870 to $104,090 is $24,220, against $15,700 down to $64,170. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Landscape Architects is larger than the realistic downside.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $30.85 at the bottom quarter, $38.39 at the midpoint, $50.04 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $79,870 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 $79,870 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