CCollegeMatcher

Surveyors

US occupation · SOC 17-1022

Job titles people report: City Surveyor, County Surveyor, Land Surveyor, Licensed Land Surveyor, Mine Surveyor, Professional Land Surveyor, Registered Land Surveyor, Staff Land Surveyor, State Surveyor, Surveyor

Pay and outlook

Median annual wage, May 2025
$75,440
Half earn more, half earn less
Middle half earn
$58,170 – $98,130
25th to 75th percentile
People employed, May 2025
50,830
Wage and salary jobs (OEWS)
Projected change, 2025–35
+5.8%
At or above the all-jobs rate (3.5% to under 7%)
Openings a year (projected)
3,100
New jobs plus replacing people who leave
Typical education to enter
Bachelor's degree
BLS
  • All figures are for the United States as a whole. Pay varies a lot by state and city.
  • Wages are for everyone working in the occupation in May 2025, at every career stage. They are not starting salaries or figures for new graduates.
  • Growth and openings are BLS projections for 2025–35. They are estimates, not promises. Openings include jobs that open up when people retire or change occupation, not just new jobs.

What the work involves

Make exact measurements and determine property boundaries. Provide data relevant to the shape, contour, gravitation, location, elevation, or dimension of land or land features on or near the earth's surface for engineering, mapmaking, mining, land evaluation, construction, and other purposes.

Main tasks

  • Direct or conduct surveys to establish legal boundaries for properties, based on legal deeds and titles.
  • Prepare and maintain sketches, maps, reports, and legal descriptions of surveys to describe, certify, and assume liability for work performed.
  • Write descriptions of property boundary surveys for use in deeds, leases, or other legal documents.
  • Verify the accuracy of survey data, including measurements and calculations conducted at survey sites.
  • Search legal records, survey records, and land titles to obtain information about property boundaries in areas to be surveyed.
  • Record the results of surveys, including the shape, contour, location, elevation, and dimensions of land or land features.
  • Prepare, or supervise preparation of, all data, charts, plots, maps, records, and documents related to surveys.
  • Compute geodetic measurements and interpret survey data to determine positions, shapes, and elevations of geomorphic and topographic features.

More specific O*NET® occupations under this one: Geodetic Surveyors.

Description and tasks from the O*NET® 31.0 Database.

Getting in

Typical education to enter (BLS)
Bachelor's degree
Training once hired: internship/residency
O*NET Job Zone 4
Considerable preparation
Most of these occupations require a four-year bachelor's degree, but some do not.

Interests it suits

The strongest of the six O*NET interest types for this occupation, highest first. The short glosses are ours.

  • Conventional: organising information, records and procedures
  • Realistic: hands-on work with tools, machines, plants or animals
  • Investigative: research, analysis and solving problems with ideas

Fields of study that lead here

From the federal CIP–SOC crosswalk, which links 2 programmes to this occupation. A link means the programme prepares people for this kind of work. It doesn't mean the programme is required, or that it's the only route.

Engineering

  • Surveying Engineering

Find colleges that fit you with our matcher: choose Engineering at the Major step.

Where many students take engineering

Ordered by the field's share of degrees awarded times undergraduate enrolment (College Scorecard), among colleges with at least 1,000 undergraduates. Online universities are included. It's a rough measure of how big the programme is. It says nothing about quality. The share counts every programme in the field, not only the ones linked to this career.

Other fields

Our college matcher doesn't offer this field as a major, so we can't suggest colleges for it here.

Engineering/Engineering-Related Technologies/Technicians

  • Surveying Technology/Surveying

Related careers

Related occupations from the O*NET database, in its order.

← All careers

Sources

This page includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. CollegeMatcher has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications. O*NET 31.0 Database · CC BY 4.0

Changes: we show the core tasks in the O*NET database with the highest importance ratings (up to eight, in that order), the top three O*NET interest types by score, and shortened Job Zone names. Titles, descriptions and task text are unchanged.

Wages: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Projections, typical entry education and training: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections 2025–35. Fields of study: NCES and BLS CIP 2020–SOC 2018 Crosswalk. All public domain. OEWS · Employment Projections · CIP–SOC crosswalk