Grounds Manager Salary 2026,
What Grounds Managers Actually Earn

How much do grounds managers make in 2026?

Grounds managers are counted in the BLS first-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service and groundskeeping workers series: OEWS May 2025 gives SOC 37-1012 a national median of $58,430 a year ($28.09 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $40,560 and the top 10% at $85,650 across 130,760 workers. That code is dominated by landscape contracting — crew supervisors at commercial and residential maintenance companies — and its median reflects that market. Institutional grounds management is the better-paid and more interesting end of it. A grounds manager at a botanical garden, university campus, cemetery, sports facility or large corporate estate runs a permanent crew, an equipment fleet, an irrigation system, a pesticide programme under licence and frequently a capital budget for tree work and renovation. Those roles sit in the upper part of the band and come with institutional benefits that contracting roles rarely match. Botanical garden and arboretum grounds managers occupy a particular niche, combining conventional grounds operations with collection care obligations and public presentation standards that ordinary landscape maintenance never faces. The credentials that matter are state pesticide applicator certification, arborist certification where there is significant tree stock, and irrigation qualifications. Employment is projected to grow 2.3% through 2034 with roughly 23,200 openings a year. → Full grounds manager career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $58,430 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 37-1012, 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 →