Land surveyors start as employees, and move up to partnership in a firm or to ownership of their own enterprise if they wish. Some wind up working for government, private corporations, or public enterprise.

Professional land surveyors take on a lot of responsibility, and should be compensated appropriately.

In general, salary for land surveyors is often similar to that of a professional engineer or lawyer - surveyors are often "comfortable" but not "wealthy."

Some field days can be tough. I've worked inside fuel tanks with 3 foot ceilings, in -42 to +42 Celsius temperatures, in snow and smoke and hail, and I've dug through snow and ice and pavement to find legal evidence. I've worked clear through the night by headlamp, and I've flown in a rickety long-islander with propane tanks strapped into the other seats. I've jury-rigged missing equipment, broken into my own truck, and cut out an emergency helicopter pad with a machete. I've been hungry, cold, tired, lost, injured, and downright hopeless!

There's a popular misconception that property boundaries are based on coordinates that surveyors can simply "walk to" with our instruments. The reality is that, while physical coordination of monuments is easier than it's ever been, property boundaries often need to be determined based on evidence and plans that are old, decrepit, and done with different technology and expectations than we have today.

Land surveyors can spend as much time reading legislation, bylaws, and engineering documents as we spend in front of an instrument in the field or calculating coordinates for a subdivision. We are mathematicians, historians, project managers, advocates, engineers, and even chainsaw operators!

Land surveyors start as employees, and move up to partnership in a firm or to ownership of their own enterprise if they wish. Some wind up working for government, private corporations, or public enterprise.