Irrigation Technician Salary 2026,
What Irrigation Technicians Actually Earn

How much do irrigation technicians make in 2026?

Irrigation technicians are counted in the BLS landscaping and groundskeeping workers series: OEWS May 2025 puts the SOC 37-3011 national median at $39,150 a year ($18.82 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $31,150 and the top 10% at $56,730. That pooling deserves a clear warning: the series covers 952,640 landscaping and grounds workers, most of them performing mowing and general maintenance, so it understates irrigation work, which is a plumbing and controls specialism attached to potable water. Three things separate a well-paid irrigation technician from the pooled median. Backflow prevention assembly tester certification is the most important, because irrigation systems connect to drinking water and many jurisdictions require certified annual testing — it is the credential that binds far more widely than irrigator licensing does. A few states run genuine licensed irrigator programmes, Texas being the best known alongside Georgia, New Jersey and Connecticut among others, requiring examination and continuing education. And Irrigation Association credentials in design, audit and management move technicians into system design and water efficiency consulting, where the work is priced professionally rather than by the hour. Employment across the pooled series is projected to grow 3.6% through 2034 with roughly 158,200 openings a year. → Full irrigation technician career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $39,150 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 37-3011, 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 →