Land Surveyor Salary in Texas 2026,
$61,150 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Texas figure is $61,150 a year, or $29.40 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 18.9% below the national median of $75,440. The band runs $42,450 at the 10th percentile to $107,850 at the 90th, which is the more informative range: the wage row includes crew and technician-level surveying alongside licensed Registered Professional Land Surveyors, and only the latter may sign and seal a survey in Texas.

Killeen-Temple at $70,270, then Sherman-Denison $66,980, Beaumont-Port Arthur $66,340, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington $66,030 and Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands $62,960. Smaller and mid-sized markets lead this table because licensed surveyors are thin outside the major metros while land development, pipeline and utility work generates survey demand everywhere in the state.

Through the Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors, which has regulated surveyors alongside engineers since the boards were consolidated in 2019. The route runs from Surveyor-in-Training status, obtained by passing the Fundamentals of Surveying examination, through documented experience under a Registered Professional Land Surveyor, to the Principles and Practice examination plus a Texas-specific state examination covering the state's land and boundary law. Texas's land grant history makes that state examination genuinely distinctive.

Chiefly because of workforce composition. Texas employs surveyors at 1.39 times the national rate on 6,410 jobs, and a large share of that workforce sits at crew and technician level rather than in licensed positions — which pulls the median down to $61,150 while the licensed tier at the $81,120 seventy-fifth percentile and $107,850 ninetieth compares far better. The state's high volume of routine development surveying supports a broad base of field work, and the median reflects that base rather than the licensed profession.

The field work is changing quickly; the professional judgement is not. GPS, drone photogrammetry and laser scanning have cut the crew hours required to collect data substantially, which affects the technician and instrument-operator tier around the $42,450 10th percentile most directly. What has not been automated is boundary determination — researching deeds and land grants, resolving conflicting evidence and taking professional responsibility for where a line falls. That is what the RPLS seal represents, and it is why the licensed end of this band has held up.

Because a survey that affects title is a legal instrument, and in Texas only a Registered Professional Land Surveyor may sign and seal one. That creates a hard boundary in the labour market: everything below the licence is work that supports a survey, and everything at and above it is work that constitutes one, carrying professional liability. The $49,660 twenty-fifth percentile and the $81,120 seventy-fifth sit on opposite sides of that line. Very few occupations have so clean a legal division inside a single wage row.

The category conflates two labour markets. SOC 17-1022 is an exact match for 'Surveyors' as BLS defines it, but the practical population in Texas includes a large field-crew workforce alongside licensed professionals, and a single median across them describes neither. Self-employment is the second issue: a substantial share of Texas RPLS holders run their own practices, and practice income is not a wage — so the $107,850 ninetieth percentile understates what licensed surveyors at the top of this profession earn in the state.

The RPLS licence, above everything else — it is a legal gate, not a preference, and it is most of the distance from the $49,660 twenty-fifth percentile to the $81,120 seventy-fifth. Then sector: pipeline, energy and large infrastructure surveying pays above routine residential lot work, and Texas has an unusual amount of the former. Then boundary and title expertise, since Texas land grant history and the state's deed record make complex boundary resolution a genuinely specialised skill. And then practice ownership, which is where the profession's real income sits and which no wage survey measures.