Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers

The midpoint of $33,580 for Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers runs $1,370 a month behind the $50,020 typical American job. Over a working life that is not a gap in income, it is a gap in everything income buys later.

National employment is 157,550. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.

These protective roles suit people who can stay alert through long uneventful stretches — boredom takes out more people here than danger does.

How long it takes to become one of the 157,550 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.

The quarters sit at $28,880 and $37,520, $720 a month apart at a ratio of 1.3x. Narrow enough that what you can expect is close to what everyone else gets.

The bottom quarter of Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers earns under $28,880 — $21,140 below the $50,020 national midpoint, or $13.88 an hour. A floor that low means the occupation cannot be judged on its median alone; a quarter of the people in it are somewhere else entirely.

Avoid it if long, uneventful shifts would be hard to stay sharp through — that is the actual difficulty of the job.

You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 157,550 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.

At 1.3x between $28,880 and $37,520, this is a narrow distribution. $33,580 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.

The middle half of this field earns between $28,880 and $37,520. That is $8,640 of range, with $33,580 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Getting to $37,520, the 75th percentile, is worth $3,940 a year more than the $33,580 midpoint and $8,640 more than the $28,880 a quarter of Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers settle for.

The fall from $33,580 to the $28,880 bottom quarter is $4,700; the climb to the $37,520 top quarter is $3,940. Slightly more of the range lies below the midpoint than above it, so the downside is the bigger movement here.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $16.14 at the midpoint for Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers, $13.88 at the 25th percentile and $18.03 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.