Zoo Veterinary Technician Salary 2026,
What Zoo Veterinary Technicians Actually Earn

How much do zoo veterinary technicians make in 2026?

Zoo veterinary technicians are counted in the BLS veterinary technologists and technicians series: OEWS May 2025 gives SOC 29-2056 a national median of $47,380 a year ($22.78 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $35,710 and the top 10% at $63,180 across 129,140 workers. That code is overwhelmingly companion animal practice, and zoo positions are a tiny fraction of it. The qualification route is the same as for any credentialed veterinary technician — an accredited programme, the national examination and state credentialing — but the number of zoological veterinary technician posts in the country is very small, typically one or a handful per accredited institution, and turnover is low. Candidates generally arrive with a credential plus companion or emergency practice experience, then add exotic and wildlife experience through internships or a specialty route. Pay sits within the general veterinary technician band, and often not at the top of it, because the competition for these positions removes any premium the specialism might otherwise command. The work is genuinely distinctive: anaesthesia and diagnostics on species with no standard protocols, restraint and immobilisation planning, preventive medicine across an entire collection, and clinical pathology on samples that no reference laboratory has ranges for. Employment across the pooled series is projected to grow 9.1% through 2034 with roughly 14,300 openings a year, almost entirely in companion practice. → Full zoo veterinary technician career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $47,380 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 29-2056, 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 →