Planning Consultant Salary 2026,
What Planning Consultants Actually Earn

How much do planning consultants make in 2026?

Planning consultants are counted in the BLS urban and regional planners series, where OEWS May 2025 reports a national median of $89,320 a year ($42.94 an hour) for SOC 19-3051, a bottom 10% near $60,010 and a top 10% at $134,490 across 44,230 workers. The code is dominated by public sector planners, and consultants sit in its upper half. The private side of planning divides into two markets. The first is contract work for jurisdictions themselves — long-range plan updates, zoning code rewrites, housing element preparation and overflow application review — which smaller jurisdictions buy rather than staff. The second, and the better paid, is entitlements consulting for developers: managing an application through review, environmental analysis, hearings and conditions of approval, in a process where delay costs the client real money every month. Consultants who can move a project through that process reliably are paid for certainty, and former public sector planners are particularly valuable because they know how the review actually works. The trade-offs are genuine: utilisation targets, work that follows the development cycle, and the loss of the pension and stability that municipal employment provides. A master's degree and AICP certification are the standard credentials on both sides. Employment is projected to grow 3.4% through 2034 with roughly 3,400 openings a year. → Full planning consultant career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $89,320 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 19-3051, 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.

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