Decide exactly where one person's land stops and the next one's starts, and sign your name to it.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
The median pay is about $75,440 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $46,880 at the lower end to about $125,590 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
6 to 8 years after high school, on the usual route.
$12,000 to $68,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
Yes. It is a regulated job, so you need a license or registration before you can work.
Good demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$75,440
Bottom tenth
$46,880
Top tenth
$125,590
The national median is $75,440 a year, the bottom tenth earn $46,880 or less and the top tenth $125,590 or more, in the 2025 survey. The survey counts licensed surveyors, not the crew members who hold the rod and run the instrument, who are counted separately as surveying and mapping technicians and paid less.
$54,240 a year
Median for surveying and mapping technicians, 2025, the kind of job you hold while you log your four years
You get paid the whole time you are qualifying.
$58,170 to $98,130
Half of all workers in the 2025 survey earn between these two figures
A licensed surveyor can sign and seal plats, which means you can own the business. Owners who are not on a payroll are not counted in this survey.
Roughly, all in
$12,000 to $68,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a two year associate degree in surveying in a state that still licenses on a shorter degree plus long experience, with the two national exams and the state license fee on top. The high end is a full four year bachelor's degree in surveying or geomatics at in state public rates, which is what most states now require. Neither figure includes the years of supervised work you need before the second exam, because that is paid employment rather than a cost. State and national surveying societies offer scholarships, so apply for them.
File the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for Pell Grants and federal loans. Several state societies and the national ones offer surveying scholarships.
Private survey and engineering firms
Boundary work, subdivisions and construction staking. The bulk of the jobs.
County and city government
Some counties still elect a county surveyor. Steady work and a pension.
Federal land agencies
The Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service hire surveyors, posted on the federal government's official jobs site at published pay grades.
Construction companies
Laying out where the building actually goes. Long days and mud.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Degree, then four years under a licensed surveyor, then two national exams and a state one.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Math above everything, especially geometry and trigonometry. Drafting, geography and any computer class help.
Accredited degree
4 years
Most state boards now want a bachelor's degree from a surveying program accredited by ABET (formerly the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology). Some states still allow an associate degree or straight experience, so read your own board's rules before you enroll.
Fundamentals of Surveying exam
One day
110 questions, 5 hours and 20 minutes of exam time in a 6 hour appointment at a testing center, $225. Most people take it in their final year of college while the math is fresh.
Work under a licensed surveyor
4 years
Most states require four years of progressive, verifiable experience. You will run crews, do research in the deeds office and learn how boundaries are actually decided.
Principles and Practice of Surveying exam, plus a state exam
After your four years
The national exam tests whether you can practice competently. Nearly every state adds its own test on local property law.
Geometry and trigonometry
This is the job. Angles, distances, coordinates.
Physics
How instruments and measurement error behave.
Computer science
Modern surveying is software as much as fieldwork.
English
You write legal descriptions that a court may one day read out loud.
Every state licenses land surveyors through its own board, and the seal is the point of the whole career. Only a licensed surveyor may certify a boundary, sign a plat or write the legal description that goes on a deed. Doing that work without a license is a crime in every state. The national council writes the two main exams and most states use both, which makes moving between states easier than it used to be, but each state still has its own law exam and its own experience rules. Check the board in the state you want to work in before you pick a college.
Public universities with an accredited surveying program
They are not common, so look at the accreditation list before anything else.
Community college first
Several community colleges run surveying technology programs that transfer into a four-year degree and let you start working on a crew immediately.
Online degree completion
A handful of universities run accredited surveying degrees you can finish at night while working on a crew. Rare and useful.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Laser scanning and drone mapping
Capturing a whole site as a point cloud, a fast-changing part of the work.
Geographic information systems
Turning survey data into maps and databases that planners and utilities pay for.
Hydrographic surveying
Measuring the bottom of rivers, harbors and coasts. A small niche.
Expert witness work
Experienced surveyors get paid by the hour to explain boundaries in court.
A second state license
Two licenses along a state line widen the work you can take.
A summer on a survey crew
Hold the rod, carry the tripod, learn the instruments. It is the normal way people discover this job exists.
Driver's license
Every crew job requires one.
Reading old handwriting
Boundary research means deeds written in cursive in 1890.
Tolerance for weather and ticks
The line does not move because it is raining.
Almost nobody hears about surveying in high school, and it is a small profession. O*NET OnLine (the Department of Labor's occupation database) projects faster than average growth between 2025 and 2035, and many survey firms are small businesses whose owners will one day sell. If you want to own something by the time you are 40, it is a realistic route.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Half the job is outdoors and half is at a desk. A field day means loading the truck, driving to the site, setting up the instrument and walking the ground finding old iron pins, fence lines and monuments left by someone a century ago. An office day means deed research, drafting the plat, doing the math that reconciles what you measured with what the documents say, and writing the description. When those two disagree, judgment is what you are being paid for.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
George Washington was a licensed county surveyor at 17 and surveyed land in Virginia for years before the revolution. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln also did survey work. It was one of the few paying technical jobs in early America.
O*NET OnLine (the Department of Labor's occupation database) counts about 52,000 surveyors in the United States in 2025, with about 3,100 job openings a year. For comparison, it counts about 863,700 lawyers.
If your measurement disagrees with the iron pin an 1890s surveyor drove into the ground, the pin usually wins. American boundary law follows the footsteps of the original survey, not the newest instrument. That is why so much of the job is research.
Satellite positioning made measuring faster, not simpler. Someone still has to decide which of three conflicting deeds describes the line, and only a licensed human can sign that decision.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Architecture and planning first, then the rest of the field. See every career in architecture and design.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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