Botanist Salary 2026,
What Botanists Actually Earn

How much do botanists make in 2026?

Botanists are placed in the BLS biological scientists, all other series — SOC 19-1029 — where OEWS May 2025 reports a national median of $98,920 a year ($47.56 an hour), a bottom 10% near $60,430 and a top 10% at $168,010 across 55,850 workers. That is a residual code: it collects biological scientists for whom BLS has no specific occupation, and it is weighted toward well-funded federal research, pharmaceutical and biotechnology employment. Most botany roles do not sit at its median. Field botanists doing rare plant surveys, wetland delineation and vegetation mapping for environmental consultancies typically earn between the 10th percentile and the lower quartile. Herbarium and botanical garden botanists sit similarly, constrained by institutional budgets. The parts of the code that do reach the median and above are federal agency botanists on published grade scales with seniority, research botanists at universities and institutions with grant funding, and plant scientists working in commercial agriculture, biotechnology and natural products. Botanical specialisms with a regulatory hook — wetland delineation, endangered species surveying, invasive species management — are the most reliably employable, because they attach to permitting requirements that generate work regardless of research funding cycles. Employment across the pooled series is projected to grow 1.2% through 2034 with roughly 4,800 openings a year. → Full botanist career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $98,920 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 19-1029, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

Full site methodology & data sources →