Compensation comes in many forms. If we can borrow from the old cliché of, “If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life,” land surveyors are among the most highly compensated professionals. Allowing for a little statistical margin for error, three quarters of land surveyors expressed the highest levels of job satisfaction in the last four POB studies of salaries and benefits.

Satisfaction doesn’t pay the bills, so what are some of the specifics we were able to measure in the Salary & Benefits Study 2015-2018? The study was conducted by POB and Clear Seas Research in March 2018 and includes historical data back to 2015. Salary trends over the period show some shifts and changes, but over 20 percent of respondents have reported salaries of $100,000 or more in the last three study years. In the 2015 study, salary distribution was dramatically different. For that study period, respondents were clustered in the $60,000 to $89,999 ranges, with 51 percent reporting salaries in that range. In the three subsequent study years, that percentage dropped to 41 to 42 percent, and the ranges of $90,000 to over $100,000 grew from 17 percent in 2015 to around 30 percent in the following three periods.