Occupation / job
Tour and Travel Guides
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
At a $38,120 midpoint, Tour and Travel Guides sits 24% under the $50,020 national figure. The shortfall is $991 a month, which is roughly the size of a rent difference between metros — worth checking before the job is the thing you blame.
Employment stands at 53,500. Tour and Travel Guides is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
Guiding suits people who can hold a group’s attention for hours and keep a route on time, and whose finances can absorb a season that ends and starts again.
No verified preparation time is on file for Tour and Travel Guides. 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
Between $32,910 and $47,700 there is $14,790, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
Under $32,910 is where a quarter of this field sits, $17,110 beneath the $50,020 a typical American job pays. The risk in Tour and Travel Guides is not the average outcome, it is how long you might spend in the bottom quarter before leaving it.
Avoid it if a season of no work would destabilise your budget; this is among the most seasonal work in the data.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 53,500 figure counts people already working as Tour and Travel Guides, 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
The quarters are $32,910 and $47,700, a ratio of 1.4x. In a distribution this narrow, the biggest single lever on your pay in Tour and Travel Guides is the cost of living where you do it.
In cash terms the middle half of Tour and Travel Guides runs $32,910 to $47,700 — $14,790 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $38,120.
The 75th percentile is $47,700. Reaching it from the $38,120 midpoint is $9,580 a year; reaching it from the $32,910 that the bottom quarter of Tour and Travel Guides earn is $14,790.
It is $5,210 from $38,120 down to $32,910 but $9,580 up to $47,700. When a range leans this far upward, the interesting question is what puts someone in the top half, because the money is disproportionately there.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Tour and Travel Guides is $18.32 an hour. The quarters sit at $15.82 and $22.93, 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 Tour and Travel Guides for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $38,120 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Tour and Travel Guides, the hourly figure is $38,120 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else