Pay, eligibility and your next skill
A short brief on three decisions: comparing pay with official figures, checking whether you can work where a role is based, and choosing what to learn next.
Free to use, no account needed
Plan your next step in geospatial work
Official pay for mapping, surveying and geography roles, tools to plan a move, write your CV and prepare for interviews, and a free QGIS workshop you can follow on your own or teach.
What the work pays
Median yearly pay from official statistics, for the occupations closest to geospatial work.
United Kingdom, full-time employees
| Occupation | Median a year | Middle half earn |
|---|---|---|
| Environment professionals | £43,362 | £33,231 to £51,849 |
| Chartered surveyors | £46,184 | £37,504 to £57,670 |
| Civil engineers | £51,366 | £39,802 to £65,000 |
ONS has no occupation group for GIS, so these are the closest official groups.
Source: Office for National Statistics, ASHE 2025 provisional, Table 14.7a, full-time employee jobs. Open Government Licence v3.0. Checked 19 September 2026.
United States, national
| Occupation | Median a year |
|---|---|
| Cartographers and Photogrammetrists | US$81,390 |
| Surveyors | US$75,440 |
| Surveying and Mapping Technicians | US$54,240 |
| Geographers | US$102,040 |
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, median annual wage. Checked 18 September 2026.
Tools you can use now
They run in your browser and need no account.
- Career roadmapsAnswer two questions about where you are and where you want to go, and get roadmaps with the skills and steps for each.
- Learning resourcesCourses, tutorials and documentation for geospatial skills, with a record of what you have studied.
- CV builderImport your CV or start blank, check the wording against a job advert, and export to DOCX or PDF.
- Cover lettersWrite a letter from your own motivation and evidence, with writing checks and DOCX or PDF export.
- Check a role against your CVPaste a job advert and see, requirement by requirement, what your CV gives evidence for.
- Interview practicePractise common and technical geospatial interview questions, with hints and sample answers.
- Offer comparisonPut two offers side by side: salary or day rate, bonus, pension and costs.
- Saved jobsKeep the roles you find in one place, with deadlines and next steps. It stays in your browser unless you sign in.
Learn by doing: Where Heat Meets People
A 25-minute guided QGIS 4.2 build plus 5 minutes of questions. Open one London heat dataset, prove what it contains, catch a map that loads but colours nothing, fix it and export a checked PDF.
Works offline, with no account, plug-in or API key. The authored materials are free to reuse and adapt under CC BY 4.0; the data sources keep their own terms.
Read, then add what you know
State of Geospatial survey
Tell us about your role, tools, skills and pay. Answers are kept for 24 months, no group smaller than 5 people is ever published, and you can delete yours by email.