Waste Management Specialist Salary 2026,
What Waste Management Specialists Actually Earn

How much do waste management specialists make in 2026?

Waste management specialists fall into the BLS business operations specialists, all other series — SOC 13-1199 — where OEWS May 2025 gives a national median of $83,050 a year ($39.93 an hour), a bottom 10% near $47,880 and a top 10% at $150,010 across 1,087,090 workers. It is a residual code holding business roles with no specific occupation of their own, so the median describes a very mixed population rather than this job. Waste management specialists usually sit in the lower half of that band, with the position determined by two things that are easy to state. The first is regulatory scope: managing municipal and recycling streams is a different job from managing RCRA hazardous waste with generator status, land disposal restrictions, manifesting and cradle-to-grave liability, and the hazardous side pays materially better. The second is commercial responsibility. Waste is a cost line, and specialists who negotiate hauler and disposal contracts, audit invoices against actual service, and redesign streams to move material out of expensive disposal categories produce savings that are directly measurable — which is a much stronger argument at a salary review than compliance alone. Employment across the pooled series is projected to grow 3% through 2034 with roughly 108,200 openings a year. → Full waste management specialist career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $83,050 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 13-1199, 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 →