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Surveying and mapping technicians

Name: Surveying and Mapping Technicians: employment and wages since 1960
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 58,010 US surveying and mapping technicians, with median pay of $54,240 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 72,410, in May 2007. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 42,000 from 1960, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for surveying and mapping technicians: RTK GPS and robotic total stations, 1995 to 2015. The RTK GPS and robotic total station era is the primary reason surveying and mapping technician employment declined between 1990 and 2010.

Official statistic: latest count and pay, highest count.Researched context: earliest figure.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 5.8% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

Official statistic

AI exposure studies

0.96 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013 Official statistic

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.96. BLS counted 47,950 of these jobs in May 2013 and 58,010 in May 2025. The count moved sharply in one step, May 2020 to May 2021, when BLS changed how it estimates these counts, so no change is derived here.

Official statistic

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Surveying and mapping technicians: jobs and pay since 1960 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-3031

Chicago

Future History. "Surveying and mapping technicians: jobs and pay since 1960." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-3031.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_17_3031, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Surveying and mapping technicians: jobs and pay since 1960}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-3031}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

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180018251850187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Chainman / Axman / Flagman (General Land Office survey crew era)

Known then as Rodman / Transitman / Instrument Man (infrastructure survey era)

Known then as Survey Technician / Survey Helper / Photogrammetric Technician (professionalization era)

Known then as Survey Technician / GIS Technician (total station and early GIS era)

Known then as Surveying and Mapping Technicians (BLS SOC 17-3031)

Known today as Surveying and Mapping Technicians (BLS SOC 17-3031)

Projected to still be called Surveying and Mapping Technicians (BLS SOC 17-3031)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

58K

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$54,240

≈ $52,849 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1785

The Land Ordinance of 1785 creates the Public Land Survey System and generates the first systematic federal demand for survey crew members in American history. Each surveying party must have a licensed deputy surveyor plus field crew assistants (chainmen, axmen, flagmen). By the 1830s, hundreds of parties are working the Old Northwest Territory; by the 1870s, thousands have covered most of the states east of the Rockies. The chainman and rodman of the PLSS are the occupational ancestors of the modern BLS 17-3031 category.

Beat · 1831

William J. Young builds the first American transit in Philadelphia, replacing the heavier European theodolite. The transit measures horizontal and vertical angles more precisely than a compass and becomes the standard field instrument for American surveying. It defines the "transitman" role, the instrument operator at the heart of every field crew, for the next 140 years. Young's design changes little through the early 20th century.

Beat · 1935

The USGS begins systematic adoption of aerial photogrammetry for topographic map production, creating a new category of mapping technician work that does not require field survey crews. Commercial aerial survey firms (Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Aero Service Corporation) employ photogrammetric technicians who operate stereoplotters to trace contours and features from overlapping aerial photographs. By the 1940s the USGS is producing 7.5-minute quadrangle topographic maps at 1:24,000 scale using aerial photography as the primary data source, and the photogrammetric technician workforce is substantial.

Beat · 1971

AGA Geodimeter and Carl Zeiss both introduce total station instruments at a professional surveying conference, combining electronic distance measurement and angle-reading in a single package. Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP 3810A total station around 1975 and coins the term "total station" as a product name. Within a decade the term becomes the industry standard for all such instruments. The total station begins replacing the transit-and-tape field crew method on precision surveys, setting in motion a crew-size reduction that will take three decades to fully play out.

Beat · 1982

ESRI launches ARC/INFO for minicomputers, the first commercially successful GIS software for environmental and planning applications. It runs on VAX minicomputers and requires programming skill, limiting adoption to federal and state agencies and universities. Over the following decade, as ArcView and then Windows-based GIS make the software accessible to non-programmers, the demand for GIS technicians, people who can operate the software, manage spatial databases, and produce maps, expands into county governments, utilities, and private engineering firms. Many surveying and mapping technicians shift from field roles to GIS roles without leaving the 17-3031 occupational classification.

Beat · 2000

At midnight on May 1, 2000, the US military turns off Selective Availability at President Clinton's order. Civilian GPS receivers improve overnight from approximately 100-meter accuracy to less than 10-meter accuracy. For RTK GPS survey systems (which already achieved centimeter precision through differential correction), the SA shutdown removes a layer of operational friction and accelerates adoption. A single survey technician with an RTK rover can now do the work that previously required a two- or three-person crew. The crew-size reduction that began with the total station accelerates sharply over the following decade.

Beat · 2016

The FAA's Part 107 Small Unmanned Aircraft Rules take effect on August 29, 2016, creating the legal framework for commercial drone operations in the United States. A commercial pilot certificate (Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate) can be obtained by anyone who passes a written aeronautical knowledge test, no flight school required. The rules immediately legitimize and expand drone-based survey and mapping services. Survey firms that previously required three-person field crews to collect topographic data on large parcels begin deploying drones as a primary data-capture tool, with a single drone operator and a GIS technician replacing crews that might have taken a week in the field.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures, ONS ASHE figures (UK pay and jobs) and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1785

On May 20, 1785, the Continental Congress passed the Land Ordinance that would shape the physical measurement of a continent. The act required that the western territories be surveyed into a rectangular grid of townships six miles square before land could be sold, and it established the first systematic federal demand for survey crews in American history. The man who carried the chain was not the surveyor in the legal sense: he was the assistant, the laborer, the fieldworker who made the geometry possible. A standard Gunter chain was 66 feet long, made of 100 iron links, and required two chainmen to stretch taut across rough terrain. One chainman held the forward end; the other drove iron arrows into the ground to mark each chain length. Axmen cleared the vegetation that the surveyor's line of sight demanded. Flagmen held painted poles upright so the instrument operator could sight on them. Together these crew members formed what the General Land Office called a "surveying party," and by the 1830s thousands of them were working their way westward across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and beyond. The work was physically punishing and often dangerous: parties working the Great Lakes region in the 1830s reported losing crew members to fever, hostile resistance, and exposure. The pay was low relative to the deputy surveyor who held the official commission; the chainmen and axmen were the unskilled or semi-skilled labor of territorial expansion. What distinguished the role from pure day labor was the precision required. A chain carried sloppily, an arrow placed carelessly, could compound into a survey error that displaced a property boundary by dozens of feet a mile later. The men who did this work well developed genuine professional knowledge of instruments, tolerances, and measurement technique. By the time the United States began building its railroad network in the 1840s, the survey crew field assistant had become a recognizable occupational category: not the licensed engineer or surveyor at the top, but the skilled field technician whose hands actually touched the instruments.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace surveying and mapping technicians? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
Target year 2035
+5.8%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 17-3031 (Surveying and mapping technicians): 58.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 62.2 thousand in 2035, a change of +3.4 thousand (+5.8%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.1% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
0.96
probability
What this measures
Published appendix value for SOC 2010 17-3031 Surveying and Mapping Technicians: probability of computerisation 0.96, rank 635 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.
Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for surveying and mapping technicians

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you here Position and hold the vertical rods, or targets…

, that theodolite operators use for sighting to measure angles, distances, and elevations.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Check all layers of maps to ensure accuracy…

, identifying and marking errors and making corrections.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Design or develop information databases that include geographic…

or topographic data.^[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of surveying and mapping technicians changed since 1785?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Gunter chain and compass (Public Land Survey era)
The Gunter chain, an iron chain of about a hundred links, was the primary distance-measuring instrument of every federal land survey from 1785 through the mid-19th century. Distance was measured by stretching and counting chains; direction was recorded with a magnetic compass. The chainman held one end and marked each chain length with an iron arrow; the transitman sighted angles; the axman cleared vegetation. Three to five field crew members were required per party, and the accuracy ceiling was set by the chainman's steadiness and the compass's tolerance for magnetic variation. A surveying party working the Northwest Territory might measure four to six miles per day under favorable conditions. The Gunter chain established the legal unit of American land measurement: several square chains equal one acre, a unit still embedded in US land descriptions today.
Effect on the work
A General Land Office surveying party in the 1800s consisted of a deputy surveyor, two chainmen, an axman, and a flagman, meaning that for every one licensed surveyor there were four or more field crew assistants. This ratio defined the labor-intensive nature of the occupation for its first century.
Engineer's transit and steel tape (railroad and highway survey era)
William J. Young built the first American transit in Philadelphia in 1831, replacing the heavier European theodolite with a lighter instrument that could be reversed on its horizontal axis to eliminate systematic errors. The transit, combined with the precision steel tape that replaced iron chains in the 1890s, became the workhorse of American surveying for over a century. It transformed the rodman's job: instead of pulling a chain, the rodman now held a vertical rod (a graduated wooden or fiberglass pole) upright while the instrument operator sighted on it through a telescope to read angles and elevations. The transit era coincided with the great infrastructure campaigns of American history: the transcontinental railroad surveys of the 1850s and 1860s, the city platting boom of the Gilded Age, the highway construction wave of the early 20th century, and the interstate system authorized in 1956. The rodman and chainman were the literal hands of all of it.
Effect on the work
The transit crew of the railroad and highway era typically had three to four members: the instrument operator (who read angles and managed the transit), a rodman (who held the vertical rod), a chainman (who measured distances), and sometimes a note-keeper or party chief. One licensed surveyor or engineer might oversee two or three such field parties, each with its own set of assistants.
Electronic distance measurement and total station (first digital era)
Carl Zeiss introduced the first electronic tacheometer in 1968. By 1971, both Zeiss and AGA Geodimeter had introduced "total station" instruments that combined an electronic theodolite with an electronic distance measurement (EDM) unit in a single package. Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP 3810A total station around 1975 and popularized the term "total station." The effect on the survey crew was immediate and structural: the steel tape was no longer needed for most work (a reflector prism on the rod replaced tape-stretching), and the instrument operator could calculate and record coordinates directly, bypassing the manual field-note transcription that had previously occupied the note-keeper. By the mid-1980s, the total station had become standard equipment for construction and boundary surveying throughout the United States. The survey crew shrank: a two-person party (one instrument operator, one rodman holding a prism) could now accomplish what previously required three or four.
Effect on the work
The transition from transit-and-tape to total station reduced typical survey crew sizes from three to four persons to two, with some tasks requiring only a single operator using early robotic models. This contributed to the contraction of the surveying technician workforce in the 1980s and 1990s, as the same volume of survey work required fewer field assistants.
GIS software and photogrammetry workstations (ESRI ARC/INFO 1982, ArcGIS 1999)
ESRI launched ARC/INFO for minicomputers in 1982, ArcView GIS in 1992, and ArcGIS in December 1999. These products created a new category of surveying and mapping work that did not require field presence: GIS technicians who digitized, analyzed, and managed spatial databases. The USGS had adopted photogrammetry for topographic mapping in the 1930s; by the 1980s photogrammetric plotting workstations (Kern, Zeiss, Wild) were digitizing aerial photography into vector layers. The combination of GIS software with digital photogrammetry in the 1990s opened the mapping technician role beyond field survey crews to anyone who could operate spatial data software. Many of the workers who entered 17-3031 in the 1990s and 2000s never held a rod or operated a total station: they compiled, edited, and quality-controlled geospatial data in an office environment. This bifurcation, field survey technician versus office GIS technician, is one of the defining structural features of the modern occupation.
Effect on the work
The GIS revolution created a growing secondary labor market for surveying and mapping technicians in government agencies, utilities, and engineering firms, partially offsetting the field-crew contraction caused by total stations and GPS. By the early 2000s, GIS technician jobs at city and county government agencies represented a meaningful share of the 17-3031 workforce.
RTK GPS and robotic total stations (one-person survey, Selective Availability ended 2000)
Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS entered commercial surveying in the early-to-mid 1990s, delivering centimeter-level precision to field crews without the post-processing required by earlier differential GPS methods. Robotic total stations, which used servomotors and wireless controllers to allow a single operator to aim the instrument remotely, became standard on larger construction sites. Together, RTK GPS and robotic total stations transformed the rodman into an anachronism for many common survey tasks: the single-person survey crew, once inconceivable, became routine. Tasks that had required a three-person party, instrument operator, rodman, and note-keeper, could now be handled by one surveyor with a rover GPS unit or a robotic total station and a Bluetooth data collector.
Effect on the work
The RTK GPS and robotic total station era is the primary reason surveying and mapping technician employment declined between 1990 and 2010. The field-crew reduction was structural: fewer assistants were needed per survey project, and the savings accrued directly to the labor budget. Construction activity recovered after 2011, but the employment rebound was modest because GPS-enabled productivity gains meant that the same construction volume required fewer field crew members than it had in 1990.
Drone photogrammetry, LiDAR, and AI-assisted point cloud processing (2010s to present)
Commercial drones equipped with cameras and LiDAR sensors entered the survey and mapping market in the early 2010s. The FAA's Part 107 rules, effective August 29, 2016, created a legal framework for commercial drone operations in the United States and triggered a rapid expansion of drone-based survey services. A drone-mounted camera can now generate a georeferenced orthomosaic and 3D point cloud of a multi-hundred-acre site in a single day, compared to weeks of traditional ground survey. Drone LiDAR, which emits laser pulses to generate dense three-dimensional point clouds, is used for corridor mapping (roads, pipelines, power lines), forestry inventory, and construction progress monitoring. AI-assisted point cloud processing software, including products from Trimble, Leica, and newer entrants, automates the classification of LiDAR returns into ground, vegetation, building, and other layers. For the surveying and mapping technician, these technologies have reshaped the job description more than any change since the total station: field data collection may take hours instead of days, but the downstream work of processing, quality-checking, and integrating the datasets has expanded. The mainstream daily-driver toolkit for a surveying technician in 2026 is a combination of field instruments (RTK GNSS rover, robotic total station for control points), drone platform (DJI Matrice or equivalent with PPK GPS), and office software (Trimble Business Center, ESRI ArcGIS Pro, Autodesk Civil 3D).

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Surveying and Mapping Technicians employment and pay by year

On record since1785

Latest US employment58,010 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$54,240 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+5.8% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 25 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Surveying and Mapping Technicians in the US: employment and pay by year, with sources
Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1960	42,000	n/a	Decennial Census 1960 [1] Researched context	Report
1990	68,000	n/a	BLS CPS [2] Researched context	Report
2003	57,740	$29,520	BLS OEWS May 2003 [3] Official statistic	Report
2004	60,530	$30,380	BLS OEWS May 2004 [3] Official statistic	Report
2005	63,910	$31,290	BLS OEWS May 2005 [3] Official statistic	Report
2006	70,940	$32,340	BLS OEWS May 2006 [3] Official statistic	Report
2007	72,410	$33,640	BLS OEWS May 2007 [3] Official statistic	Report
2008	71,920	$35,120	BLS OEWS May 2008 [3] Official statistic	Report
2009	62,940	$37,190	BLS OEWS May 2009 [3] Official statistic	Report
2010	53,870	$37,900	BLS OEWS May 2010 [3] Official statistic	Report
2011	48,590	$39,350	BLS OEWS May 2011 [3] Official statistic	Report
2012	47,000	$39,670	BLS OEWS May 2012 [3] Official statistic	Report
2013	47,950	$40,670	BLS OEWS May 2013 [3] Official statistic	Report
2014	50,750	$40,770	BLS OEWS May 2014 [3] Official statistic	Report
2015	53,620	$42,010	BLS OEWS May 2015 [3] Official statistic	Report
2016	53,920	$42,450	BLS OEWS May 2016 [3] Official statistic	Report
2017	51,890	$43,340	BLS OEWS May 2017 [3] Official statistic	Report
2018	52,300	$44,380	BLS OEWS May 2018 [3] Official statistic	Report
2019	53,030	$45,010	BLS OEWS May 2019 [3] Official statistic	Report
2020	53,370	$46,200	BLS OEWS May 2020 [3] Official statistic	Report
2021	56,070	$46,910	BLS OEWS May 2021 [3] Official statistic	Report
2022	56,580	$47,180	BLS OEWS May 2022 [3] Official statistic	Report
2023	56,050	$48,940	BLS OEWS May 2023 [3] Official statistic	Report
2024	56,720	$51,940	BLS OEWS May 2024 [3] Official statistic	Report
2025	58,010	$54,240	BLS OEWS May 2025 [3] Official statistic	Report

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See all roles in Engineering

Gunter chain and compass (Public Land Survey era) (1785 to 1831)

Engineer's transit and steel tape (railroad and highway survey era) (1831 to 1970)

Electronic distance measurement and total station (first digital era) (1970 to 1995)

GIS software and photogrammetry workstations (ESRI ARC/INFO 1982, ArcGIS 1999) (1982 to 2005)

RTK GPS and robotic total stations (one-person survey, Selective Availability ended 2000) (1995 to 2015)

Drone photogrammetry, LiDAR, and AI-assisted point cloud processing (2010s to present) (2010 to present)

Surveying and Mapping Technicians employment and pay by year

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