EHS Specialist Salary 2026,
What EHS Specialists Actually Earn

How much do ehs specialists make in 2026?

EHS specialists are the core occupation inside the BLS occupational health and safety specialists series, where OEWS May 2025 reports a national median of $90,150 a year ($43.34 an hour) for SOC 19-5011, a bottom 10% near $55,000 and a top 10% at $134,950 across 140,610 workers. Because the code also contains EHS managers and directors, a specialist is typically positioned between the lower quartile and the median rather than at the top of the published band. The question worth answering on this page is how far the individual-contributor route goes. It goes further than most people assume, but only through depth. A generalist specialist who runs inspections, training and recordkeeping competently is priced in the middle of the band and is replaceable. A specialist who owns a genuine technical discipline — industrial hygiene sampling and exposure modelling, process safety management for covered processes, ergonomics with measurable injury reduction, or environmental permitting for a complex site — becomes the person the organisation cannot hire quickly, and those roles reach the upper quartile without a management title. Employment is projected to grow 12.5% through 2034 with roughly 14,900 openings a year. → Full ehs specialist career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $90,150 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 19-5011, 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 →