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Landscaping supervisors

Official title First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers (SOC 37-1012)

Also called Landscape supervisor, Grounds supervisor, Lawn service supervisor, Grounds maintenance supervisor, Groundskeeping supervisor

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 130,760 US landscaping supervisors, with median pay of $58,430 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 120,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for landscaping supervisors: Robotic mowers, 2018 to 2024. Industry consensus as of 2024 is that robotic mowers optimize existing labor rather than displacing supervisory positions.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 4% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

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.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Landscaping supervisors: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/37-1012

Chicago

Future History. "Landscaping supervisors: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/37-1012.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_37_1012, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Landscaping supervisors: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/37-1012}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Head Gardener / Park Superintendent (estate and municipal park era)
Known then as Grounds Superintendent / Head Groundskeeper (golf course and institutional era)
Known then as Grounds Foreman / Landscape Foreman (suburban commercial expansion era)
Known then as Grounds Supervisor / Landscape Supervisor (professionalization era)
Known then as First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers (BLS SOC 37-1012)
Known today as First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers (BLS SOC 37-1012)
Projected to still be called First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers (BLS SOC 37-1012)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
131K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$58,430
Est.

≈ $56,932 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1858

Frederick Law Olmsted is appointed superintendent of Central Park in New York City -- a role that blends landscape design supervision, labor management, and public administration. Olmsted directs hundreds of workers (primarily Irish immigrants) grading terrain, installing drainage, and planting the meadows and woodlands of the new park. His position is the most visible early American example of a grounds supervisor operating at institutional scale, and his methods (systematic crew organization, documented planting plans, daily inspection rounds) established templates the commercial industry would later inherit.

Beat · 1926

On September 13, 1926, 60 greenkeepers gather at Sylvania Country Club in Toledo, Ohio to found what would become the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA). The organization's founding purpose is to advance professional standards and share agronomic knowledge among the men responsible for maintaining golf course turf -- at a time when the 1920s golf boom had created thousands of new courses across the United States. The GCSAA is the first professional association specifically for a subset of grounds supervisors, and it represents the earliest formal institutionalization of the role.

Beat · 1947

Abraham Levitt and his sons begin construction of Levittown, New York -- 17,000 homes built between 1947 and 1951, each with its own lawn. The Levittown model, replicated across the American suburban landscape for the next three decades, creates the residential turf market that will support a commercial lawn care industry of millions of clients. VA loans and FHA financing allow millions of veterans to become homeowners, and the expectation that every home has a maintained lawn becomes part of the American suburban contract.

Beat · 1961

The Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA) is founded -- the first national trade association for commercial landscape contracting as distinct from golf course maintenance. ALCA's formation marks the professional self-identification of the commercial landscaping sector as its own industry with distinct labor, safety, and quality standards. The founding directly follows the postwar suburban boom that created the commercial client base for professional landscape maintenance.

Beat · 1969

ChemLawn is founded in Troy, Ohio and breaks the $1 million revenue mark by 1970. ChemLawn becomes the first national lawn care franchise brand, spreading chemistry-based fertilization and pesticide services from its southwest Ohio roots to the entire country by the mid-1970s. The franchise model creates a new type of landscape supervisor: the route manager or branch manager responsible for a fleet of treatment trucks and a roster of residential accounts, measured on retention rate, upsell conversion, and complaint resolution rather than on traditional horticultural craftsmanship.

Beat · 1987

ChemLawn agrees to be acquired by Ecolab for $353 million -- at the time numbering 241 branches nationwide and carrying sales of $353 million. The acquisition reflects how thoroughly the commercial landscape industry has institutionalized: what started as a single Troy, Ohio operation in 1969 is now a national enterprise generating hundreds of millions in revenue and employing thousands of route supervisors and branch managers. Ecolab sells ChemLawn to ServiceMaster in 1992 for $103 million; it is eventually merged into TruGreen.

Beat · 2018

The US landscape services market reaches approximately $99 billion in 2018 (direct output), with total economic contributions of $348 billion including multiplier effects and 1.6 million direct employees. The green industry -- which includes landscape maintenance, lawn care, tree care, irrigation, and horticulture -- has become one of the larger sectors of the American service economy. The supervisory tier (BLS 37-1012) numbers approximately 209,000 workers at the BLS May 2018 survey, earning a median of $48,060 annually.

Beat · 2024

The US landscape services market is valued at approximately $153 billion, with more than 1.4 million workers and 692,777 landscaping businesses. More than 80% of lawn care business owners report staffing difficulty -- a chronic labor shortage that has accelerated adoption of both robotic mowing technology and AI-assisted scheduling platforms. The supervisory role is increasingly a technology-management job as much as a people-management job: supervisors in 2024 juggle GPS crew tracking, AI scheduling tools, aerial property measurement platforms, and robotic mower programs alongside the traditional tasks of quality inspection, pesticide oversight, and crew coaching.

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 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.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace landscaping supervisors? 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
→ 2035
+4%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 37-1012 (First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service, and groundskeeping workers): 243.3 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 253.0 thousand in 2035, a change of +9.7 thousand (+4.0%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (46.8% 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.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
24.5%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 37-1012.00 First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.245, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.073 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.418; GPT-4-rated β 0.355. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for landscaping supervisors

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereBuild and manage weekly crew schedules: review upcoming jobs, crew availability, equipment bookings, and weather forecasts

Build and manage weekly crew schedules: review upcoming jobs, crew availability, equipment bookings, and weather forecasts; use AI scheduling tools (Aspire Scheduling Assistant, Jobber) to generate and optimize route assignments; push updates to crew mobile devices; intervene on same-day changes when weather, illness, or equipment failure forces replanning.[6],[7]

Where your edge is

Learn the AI scheduling platform your company uses at a depth beyond basic operation. Supervisors who understand how the algorithm weights crew skill, travel time, and job priority can override it intelligently when site conditions are unusual. Platform fluency is the most direct differentiator between field supervisors and operations managers in landscaping.

AI is sitting alongside you herePrepare service estimates and bids for landscaping, lawn service, and groundskeeping contracts: use AI property measurement tools (Aspire PropertyIntel) to generate aerial takeoffs from satellite imagery

Prepare service estimates and bids for landscaping, lawn service, and groundskeeping contracts: use AI property measurement tools (Aspire PropertyIntel) to generate aerial takeoffs from satellite imagery; review AI-drafted quotes (Jobber Quote Automations) and adjust for site-specific conditions, seasonal factors, and labor availability; present bids to clients and negotiate scope.[9],[7]

Where your edge is

Practice reading aerial property measurement outputs critically. AI takeoffs can miss terrain complexity, access constraints, and irrigation zones that drive labor hours. The supervisor who can rapidly audit and correct an AI draft estimate protects margin; the one who approves drafts uncritically leaves money on the table or loses it on site.

AI is sitting alongside you hereTrack labor costs and maintain job-level budget control: review daily GPS-verified time entries in Workyard or Aspire, approve hours, investigate jobs where actual labor exceeds estimates by more than 15%, and escalate budget overruns with documented root-cause analysis (weather delay, scope creep, equipment failure, crew efficiency gap).

Track labor costs and maintain job-level budget control: review daily GPS-verified time entries in Workyard or Aspire, approve hours, investigate jobs where actual labor exceeds estimates by more than 15%, and escalate budget overruns with documented root-cause analysis (weather delay, scope creep, equipment failure, crew efficiency gap).[1],[10]

Where your edge is

Build a habit of reviewing job cost actuals vs. estimates each week, not at month end. A labor overrun on a recurring service contract is cheapest to correct when it appears on week two; by month four, the margin is gone and the client relationship is at risk. Supervisors who track cost weekly are the ones directors trust with larger portfolio contracts.

Where landscaping supervisors go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Facilities Managers

Facilities Managers oversee the full physical environment of buildings and campuses: grounds, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, safety, and vendor contracts. The landscaping supervisor already owns a core slice of this portfolio (outdoor maintenance operations, supply procurement, safety compliance, vendor coordination for subcontractors). The step up requires acquiring mechanical systems literacy (HVAC fundamentals, building systems), capital project budgeting authority, and a broader vendor management scope. Many facilities managers in university, hospital, and corporate campus settings began as grounds or maintenance supervisors. IFMA (International Facility Management Association) offers the Facilities Management Professional (FMP) credential as the recognized entry-level path.

What you'd add
  • · IFMA Facilities Management Professional (FMP) credential: recognized entry-level certification, available as a self-study program from IFMA
  • · CMMS administration skills: advance from user to administrator level in platforms like Aspire, UpKeep, or ServiceTitan to manage multi-trade work orders and asset tracking
  • · Building mechanical systems fundamentals: HVAC, electrical, and plumbing literacy sufficient to commission vendors and verify scope (IFMA Building Systems course or community college 1-semester option)
  • · OSHA 30 General Industry: the compliance baseline expected for facilities managers who oversee multi-hazard environments
  • · Capital budget planning: ask to participate in the next annual facilities capital budget cycle as an observer; the vocabulary and process are half the access barrier
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of landscaping supervisors changed since 1858?

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

  • Reel mower + horse-drawn gang mower (Budding 1830, US commercial from 1870s)

    Edwin Budding patented the first reel-type cylinder lawn mower in 1830 outside Gloucestershire, England -- a device adapted from a textile mill cutting mechanism. By the 1870s, American manufacturers had produced push-reel mowers and horse-drawn gang mowers for parks and large estates. The grounds supervisor of this era managed the logistics of animal and human power: how many horses were needed to cut the meadows before the weekend, how many hands to follow behind raking clippings, how to keep reel blades sharp. The technology defined the staffing math -- a park like Central Park required dozens of workers with reel mowers and horses to maintain its lawns on a weekly cycle.

  • Gas-powered mower (Ransomes 1902; Jacobsen gas mower 1921)

    Ransomes of Ipswich produced the first commercially purchasable internal combustion lawn mower in 1902. By 1921, Knud and Oscar Jacobsen had introduced a gas-powered mower capable of cutting about four acres a day -- a figure that changed the arithmetic of large grounds maintenance entirely. The grounds superintendent now managed machines as well as people: fuel, carburetor maintenance, blade sharpening schedules, and safe operating procedures were added to the supervisory knowledge base. Golf course superintendents were among the earliest heavy adopters, driven by the 1920s golf boom that added thousands of courses to the US landscape.

  • Rotary mower + synthetic fertilizer + chemical pesticides (postwar commercial era)

    The postwar period transformed the grounds supervisor's toolkit in two directions simultaneously. The rotary mower -- cheaper, faster, and easier to operate than the reel mower for most residential and commercial turf -- became the workhorse of the new commercial lawn care industry. At the same time, synthetic fertilizers (DuPont's Uramite, 1955, was explicitly marketed for lawns) and chemical pesticides created a new knowledge requirement: the supervisor had to understand product application rates, label requirements, and the early regulatory framework that would eventually require state pesticide applicator licensing. ChemLawn, founded in 1969 in Troy, Ohio and broke the $1 million mark by 1970, built its entire business model on chemistry-based lawn treatment, making chemical knowledge central to the supervisor role in commercial lawn care.

    Effect on the work

    The commercial lawn care boom of the 1960s-1970s created a large new class of route supervisor positions at national franchises (ChemLawn, TruGreen, founded 1973-1974) and regional landscape contractors. Industry analysts described the 1980s as the "Wild West" of lawn care -- fast growth, thin margins, and high demand for supervisors who could train and retain seasonal crews.

  • Commercial fleet management + pesticide licensing + trade certification (ALCA, PLCAA, GCSAA)

    The 1980s brought two structural changes to the supervisory role. First, the professional trade associations formalized credentialing: ALCA (founded 1961) established the Certified Landscape Professional (CLP) credential in 1993; the GCSAA set academic and experiential standards for golf course superintendents; and the PLCAA (founded 1979) created a separate credentialing track for chemical lawn care operations. Second, federal and state pesticide regulations under FIFRA (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act) required commercial pesticide applicators to hold state licenses -- converting what had been informal knowledge into a legally mandated competency. The supervisor became the licensed authority on a job site, adding regulatory accountability to crew management.

  • GPS crew tracking + field service management software (early digital operations)

    The introduction of GPS-enabled fleet tracking and field service management platforms (ServiceTitan, Jobber founded 2011, Aspire founded 2012) moved the landscape supervisor's administrative work from paper-based route sheets and phone calls to cloud-connected dashboards. A supervisor could see every truck's location in real time, compare actual labor hours to job estimates by property, and dispatch crew changes without a phone call. The shift reduced windshield time and improved job-cost visibility, but adoption was uneven: large commercial contractors moved to these platforms first; small residential operations often still used paper or basic spreadsheets through the mid-2010s.

  • Robotic mowers (commercial deployment, from curiosity to competitive tool)

    Commercial autonomous mowers -- from manufacturers including Husqvarna (CEORA for large turf), Mean Green Products, and RC Mowers -- moved from niche pilot programs to genuine operational adoption among US landscape contractors between roughly 2018 and 2024. COVID-19 in 2020 accelerated adoption by making labor scarcity acute: robotic mowers that could operate overnight on large commercial properties without active supervision reduced crew hours per site. The supervisor's role shifted: instead of scheduling a crew to mow a large corporate campus, the supervisor scheduled the robot, programmed the boundary wire, and monitored the exception log. Robotic mowers do not eliminate supervisors -- they require a human who can troubleshoot the machine, manage the workflow exceptions, and direct the remaining crew toward non-mowing tasks.

    Effect on the work

    Industry consensus as of 2024 is that robotic mowers optimize existing labor rather than displacing supervisory positions. Contractors report redeploying crew time to higher-value tasks (plantings, detail work, client interaction) when large-turf mowing is automated. The supervisory span-of-control per dollar of revenue improves.

  • Agentic AI scheduling and operations platforms (Aspire Scheduling Assistant, Jobber AI, 2025)

    Aspire's agentic AI (2025) introduced a Scheduling Assistant that analyzes crew availability, job locations, traffic patterns, skills, and equipment requirements to generate optimized daily routes and crew assignments; weather-triggered automatic rescheduling notifies clients and pushes updates to crew mobile devices automatically. Jobber's AI suite (2025) added Jobber Voice for hands-free field scheduling, an AI Receptionist handling inbound calls and booking 24/7, and Quote Automations that draft estimates from job requests for supervisor review. These tools restructure the supervisory role from daily administrative calendar management toward exception handling and client relationship work -- the parts of the job that still require physical judgment and human presence.

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First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers employment and pay by year

On record since1858
Latest US employment130,760 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$58,430 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+4% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 82031)

    Employment, 2020
    19,400, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 82031 Contractors and supervisors, landscaping, grounds maintenance and horticulture services, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$56,800, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 82031 Contractors and supervisors, landscaping, grounds maintenance and horticulture services, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1900120,000n/aEst., Derived estimate of the ~1900… Researched contextReport
1930165,000n/aEst., Derived estimate of the ~1930… Researched contextReport
1960210,000n/aEst., Pennington Researched contextReport
1980160,000$14,000Est., MSU Turfgrass Information Center Researched contextReport
2000190,000n/aEst., National Association of Landscape… Researched contextReport
200395,450$33,770BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004102,380$35,340BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005106,280$36,320BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006111,100$37,300BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007110,340$38,720BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008108,940$39,920BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009103,540$40,950BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010100,630$41,860BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011100,460$42,050BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201299,010$42,160BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201399,620$42,570BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014101,190$43,160BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015103,450$43,980BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016103,070$45,740BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017100,320$47,030BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018101,390$48,220BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019103,580$49,370BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020103,730$51,010BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021116,380$48,800BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022122,910$50,810BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023126,020$55,740BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024124,130$56,170BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025130,760$58,430BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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<p style="font-size:13px;margin:4px 0 0"><a href="https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/37-1012">First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers: jobs and pay over time</a>, from Future History</p>

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