Is there a land surveyor shortage? What it means for hiring and what firms are doing

Our research found no federal statistic called "the surveyor shortage."

What you have is three official lenses — employment projections, licensure counts and business census data — and read together they describe a market where demand grows steadily while the licensed bench refills slowly.

BLS's Employment Projections program counts about 52,000 surveyor jobs in 2025 — a figure that includes the self-employed — with 71% of them in architectural, engineering and related services.

The same program counts about 58,800 surveying and mapping technician jobs in 2025, with 60% in architectural, engineering and related services.

From 2025 to 2035, BLS projects surveyor employment to grow 6 percent — faster than average — with about 3,100 openings a year, many from replacing workers who retire or change occupations.

Technician employment is projected to grow 6 percent too, with about 6,900 openings a year.

The projections table shows why the churn matters.

Surveyor employment moves from 52,000 in 2025 to 55,000 in 2035 — net growth of about 3,000 jobs over the whole decade, against about 3,100 openings in an average year.

Technicians show the same shape: 58,800 jobs in 2025, 62,200 projected in 2035 — about 3,400 net new jobs in a decade against 6,900 openings a year.

That arithmetic means nearly all of the decade's openings refill existing seats rather than add new ones — replacement demand, which is the market an employer actually competes in.

Licensure data can't give you a national bench size: NCEES reports licensee counts per state, counting residents and nonresidents separately and counting licensees who are licensed in multiple states in each of them — so state counts must not be summed into a national total.

NCEES's 2025 report shows, for example, 2,108 resident and 346 nonresident surveyors in Texas, and 2,364 resident surveyors in Florida.

The business footprint is equally concrete: Census County Business Patterns 2023 counted 7,288 establishments in NAICS 541370 (Surveying and Mapping (except Geophysical) Services), employing 58,087 people with annual payroll of about $4.30 billion.

Two labels on that line: CBP counts establishments — locations, not companies — and its employment figure covers all payroll employees at those locations, not just licensed surveyors.

For your firm, the practical reading is this: our research found no counted national vacancy figure, so the numbers that matter are the ones in front of you.

Count your licensed signers and crew seats, note when each is likely to turn over, and check what the openings market is paying.

See what candidates see on the jobs board: land surveyor jobs and survey technician jobs.

Three forces shape the licensed end of this market: retirements out of the profession, a long education-and-experience pipeline, and licensure itself.

Retirement first.

BLS attributes many of the projected surveyor openings — about 3,100 a year — to replacing workers who retire or change occupations, and the decade arithmetic above shows most of those openings refill existing seats.

The average-age question deserves honesty.

Claims quoting a specific average age for licensed land surveyors circulate in hiring discussions; our research could not verify a national average age from a primary source, and NCEES's licensee counts are per state.

Without a verified national figure, the age that matters is on your own roster: when each of your licensees is likely to retire.

The pipeline is the second force.

BLS describes the typical entry-level education for surveyors as a bachelor's degree, and notes surveyors must be licensed before they can certify legal documents and provide surveying services to the public.

That license sits years down the road: entry-level surveyors often work under a licensed surveyor for several years before qualifying for a license, and some surveyors start as technicians and become licensed after many years of experience, with requirements varying by state.

NCEES describes its PS exam as designed for surveyors who have gained at least four years of work experience — one more reason a licensed seat is a multi-year refill.

The pipeline is moving.

NCEES reports that FS and PS exam volumes reached a 15-year high in fiscal 2025 (October 2024 through September 2025).

In that year, 1,433 first-time takers sat the FS exam with a 63% pass rate, while 853 repeat takers passed at 35%.

On the PS side, 1,188 first-time takers passed at 60%, and first-time takers holding an ABET-accredited bachelor's passed at 70%.

Read those rates as a funnel, not a gate: a first-time pass rate below 100% means part of each year's takers comes back for another attempt, which stretches the time between entering the pipeline and holding a license.

The third force is licensure itself — and it is state law.

Each state board writes its own education routes, experience rules and exams, so the national numbers above never stand in for your state's route.

Before you build a posting, a sponsorship plan or a succession assumption on any of this, confirm the current requirements with the state licensing board — routes and rules change, and the board's word governs.

Our research found no federal dataset that ranks surveying roles by time-to-fill or by open positions, so no honest "hardest role" league table exists.

What the published numbers do support is a reading of where the bench runs thinnest.

The licensed tier is the obvious one: licenses are issued state by state, and a licensed seat grown from a new entrant takes years to refill through the education, experience and exam ladder described above.

Crew seats carry the largest volume of openings: about 6,900 technician openings a year, in the occupation where the party chief, instrument operator and rod person titles sit — BLS publishes no separate occupation for any of those titles.

Specialist seats — drone surveyors, LiDAR and SUE technicians, survey project managers — are harder to read: our research found no separate occupation line for them in the federal data, so no published headcount sizes their candidate pools.

Drafter demand is the counterpoint: BLS projects overall drafter employment to grow only 1 percent from 2025 to 2035, against 6 percent for surveyors and technicians.

One window on the recruiting pool: BLS's Current Population Survey annual averages for 2025 put women at 12.2% of employed surveying and mapping technicians.

Recruiting from the wider population — people not yet in or adjacent to surveying — adds capacity without taking a crew member or trainee from another firm.

For planning purposes, the seats to map first are the licensee in responsible charge, the party chiefs who run crews day to day, and the trainee bench that eventually becomes both.

The firm responses that add capacity fall into three groups: grow your own licensed bench, change what a crew can cover, and pay competitively for the seats you can't grow.

Grow-your-own starts on the crew.

BLS notes some surveyors start as surveying technicians and become licensed after many years of experience, and that technician roles typically need a high school diploma plus moderate-term on-the-job training — your entry bench is trainable by design.

Sponsorship is the licensed version of the same move: put a promising crew member on the FS exam path, and protect the qualifying field time their state's rules require.

Assign work a licensee can verify, and you add capacity to the profession instead of bidding someone else's away.

NCEES's fiscal 2025 volume record matters to firms for a simple reason: FS and PS exam volume is higher than in any of the past fifteen years.

A firm that feeds its own crew members into that queue hires from a bench it built rather than bidding for someone else's licensee.

When you write the recruiting pitch for any of these seats, it helps to know the career as the candidate sees it — our land surveyor career guide covers the field from the worker's side.

Technology is the second lever.

Robotic total stations, GNSS rovers, laser scanners and drone platforms each cover different work, and how a firm crews around its equipment mix is a design decision.

Crew design — including whether one-person operations make sense on your work mix — is a decision to model against your own backlog: no published source establishes typical crew sizes, so model your own.

Drone capacity comes with its own federal rule.

Under 14 CFR 107.12, no one may manipulate the flight controls of a small unmanned aircraft system without meeting one of two conditions.

They must hold a remote pilot certificate with a small UAS rating and meet the recency requirements — or be directly supervised by a remote pilot in command who can immediately take control.

The FAA's Part 107 certificate is an aviation credential layered on top of surveying skills, not a surveying license; where drone mapping becomes the practice of surveying is each state board's position.

Pay is the third lever, and the honest anchors are the federal series.

BLS OEWS for May 2025, national, all industries, shows surveyors (SOC 17-1022) at a median of $36.27 an hour — $75,440 a year.

Surveying and mapping technicians (SOC 17-3031) show a median of $26.08 an hour, $54,240 a year.

Within architectural, engineering and related services — NAICS 541300, the industry row that includes survey firms — the May 2025 medians run slightly below those: $73,320 for surveyors and $50,340 for technicians.

Labels to keep straight here.

OEWS counts payroll (wage-and-salary) workers — 50,830 surveyors in May 2025 — while the projections figure earlier in this page (52,000) counts jobs including the self-employed.

And the surveyor series mixes licensed and unlicensed surveyors, so no separate licensed-PLS median exists in the data.

BLS also publishes no wage for surveying firms alone — NAICS 541370 is not a published row — so the 541300 industry figure is the closest peer number.

Use the series as occupation-wide anchors to position an offer, not as the market rate for a title: your state, your work mix and your local competitors set the actual number.

Finally, holding a seat is cheaper than refilling it: pay reviews anchored to the published series, a written travel and per diem policy, realistic schedules and equipment that works are retention craft, not data.

The role-by-role detail — what to look for, what to ask, what to pay — lives on our hiring hub.

Pricing and backlog are where a shortage stops being a statistic and starts being an operating condition.

The mechanism is simple: surveyors must be licensed before they can certify legal documents, so signed work moves only as fast as licensed review time — when licensed capacity is the constraint, the queue grows before the calendar does.

The industry's small-firm shape raises the stakes: Census SUSB 2022 counted 6,927 firms in NAICS 541370 with about $8.88 billion in receipts.

4,034 of those firms — about 58% — had annual receipts under $500,000, and 5,272 (about 76%) had receipts under $1 million.

In a market of small firms, the firm with one licensee has one licensed signer — one retirement there removes it, which is why succession at the licensee level is a backlog question, not just an HR one.

Scale exists but is rare: 47 firms had receipts of $100 million or more, operating 209 establishments with 5,997 employees in total.

Four operator responses follow from the mechanism.

Quote lead times from your real queue, not from the optimistic version of it — a committed date your licensee can't hit costs more than a slower quote.

Price for the market you're actually in, and when capacity binds, remember that more low-margin volume makes the queue worse: the constraint is the licensee's time, so protecting it is worth more than another project.

Sequence the backlog deliberately — margin, deadline risk and collection risk are the sort — and put the licensee's review time on the schedule as its own line item.

And hire with the supervision structure in mind: under the NCEES Model Law, which states adapt, unlicensed employees may do surveying work only when it includes no final surveying decisions and is done under the responsible charge of, and verified by, a licensee.

Every seat you add produces through that structure, so the licensed bench — the tier this page shows takes years to grow — is also the one that turns new hires into billable capacity.

Employer information, not legal, tax or licensing advice. Licensure and supervision rules are state law — confirm them with the state licensing board, and employment, tax and business questions with the DOL, the IRS, a CPA or counsel as they arise.