Occupation / job
Urban and Regional Planners
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
$89,320 is $3,275 a month above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Differences of that size in Urban and Regional Planners are held in place by a barrier — a licence, a residency, a clearance — and the barrier is the real subject of this page.
44,230 people are employed as Urban and Regional Planners. At that scale every large metro has a real market, and the difference between a good year and a bad one is usually which employer you are at rather than whether anyone is hiring.
Social science suits people who can study human behaviour without needing the answer to be flattering, and who can defend a method to people who dislike the conclusion.
How long it takes to become one of the 44,230 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
From $72,020 to $110,030 is $3,167 a month, or 1.5x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.
The 25th percentile is $72,020, $22,000 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.
Avoid it if you would find it hard to publish a finding that a funder, a discipline or the public did not want.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 44,230 figure counts people already working as Urban and Regional Planners, 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
A 1.5x ratio is the most common shape in this data: some room to move, none of it quick. Read $89,320 as where you might be after years in Urban and Regional Planners, and $72,020 as where you would start.
In cash terms the middle half of Urban and Regional Planners runs $72,020 to $110,030 — $38,010 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $89,320.
The 75th percentile is $110,030. Reaching it from the $89,320 midpoint is $20,710 a year; reaching it from the $72,020 that the bottom quarter of Urban and Regional Planners earn is $38,010.
From $89,320 it is $17,300 down to the bottom quarter and $20,710 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 $42.94 at the midpoint for Urban and Regional Planners, $34.62 at the 25th percentile and $52.89 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Urban and Regional Planners. The self-employed are excluded, so $89,320 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $89,320 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Urban and Regional Planners, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else