Environmental Health Specialist Salary 2026,
What Environmental Health Specialists Actually Earn

How much do environmental health specialists make in 2026?

Environmental health specialists — the sanitarians who inspect restaurants, pools, septic systems, housing and water supplies for local and state health departments — are placed in the BLS occupational health and safety specialists series, where OEWS May 2025 gives SOC 19-5011 a national median of $90,150 a year ($43.34 an hour) and a range from $55,000 at the 10th percentile to $134,950 at the 90th across 140,610 workers. That pooled figure is dominated by industrial and corporate EHS roles, and this page will not pretend otherwise: public health environmental specialists typically earn between the 10th percentile and the median of this band, on published government pay scales, not at the midpoint. The honest framing is that this is a public service career with public service pay, a defined step ladder, strong pension and health provision, and unusually secure employment. The credential that governs it is state registration — Registered Environmental Health Specialist or Registered Sanitarian — which most states require and which maps directly to salary steps. The people who reach the upper part of the pooled band are those who move into programme management for a large county or state, or who cross into industry food safety and regulatory affairs, where the same knowledge is priced commercially. Employment across the pooled series is projected to grow 12.5% through 2034 with roughly 14,900 openings a year. → Full environmental health 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 →