The Urban and Regional Information Systems Association recently released the URISA Salary Survey for IT/GIS Professionals, July 2007, based on responses collected last year from 2,402 individuals. Nearly two thirds of the respondents (63.8 percent) indicated that they had seen an increase in the number of GIS staff employed by their organizations over the past five years.

GIS and its "surroundings" - salaries in the United States

The URISA, The Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association) functioning in the USA, recently released the URISA Salary Survey for IT/GIS Professionals, July 2007, based on responses collected last year from 2,402 individuals. Nearly two thirds of the respondents (63.8 percent) indicated that they had seen an increase in the number of GIS staff employed by their organizations over the past five years.
In addition to salaries, this exhaustive, 499-page survey reports and cross-tabulates data on job title/position, type of employer, location of employment, staff size, departments served, years of professional experience, education, computer skills, other job requirements, and demographic characteristics. Additionally, the data is broken down into four regions (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), salary figures are broken down into ten-thousand-dollar brackets, and the number of respondents for each tabulation is indicated.
The report addresses the following questions:

·  How have salary levels changed since 2003?
·  Have GIS departments increased in size?
·  Are more non-technology skills required?
·  What GIS software proficiencies are necessary?
·  What benefits do organizations typically offer?
·  How long is the average workweek?
·  How has GIS certification impacted salaries?
·  Are GIS professionals actively pursuing continuing education?

Nearly two thirds of respondents (63.7 percent) are employed within some level of government, from local through federal agencies (down from 71.7 percent in 2003). About a quarter (26.8 percent) are employed in the private sector (up 19.3 percent in 2003). Slightly less than two-fifths of survey respondents work in municipal (19.1 percent) or county (20.3 percent) government.

GIS-related job titles are not standardized, so URISA compiled an extensive list of model job descriptions, which detail job responsibilities under various titles. The report includes these job titles and paragraph-length descriptions of their basic responsibilities. Respondents were asked to match the descriptions with their current positions and, predictably, the vast majority (84.6 percent) chose GIS-related titles. The top ten were:

More than one out of four respondents (27.4 percent) work for organizations with 1,000 or more employees. On average, 2,593 individuals are employed, in total, by their organizations, with an average of 8 GIS staff members in the respondents' departments and an average of 61 GIS employees organization-wide. A majority of respondents (58.9 percent) have fewer than 5 GIS staff members in their departments and less than 10 in their entire organizations (57.8 percent).

Respondents have an average of 9.6 years of GIS professional experience. Most (85.0 percent) hold a bachelor's degree or higher and more than one-third (37.3 percent) a postgraduate degree. Most often, their educational degrees were in geography (44.2 percent), GIS (33.1 percent), environmental science (12.2 percent), computer science (11.0 percent), and planning (10.2 percent). In addition, slightly more than one quarter are certified GIS professionals (28.1 percent) and more than half (58.2 percent) of those who are not currently certified plan to apply for certification in the next three years.

As for proficiency with GIS software, ESRI products were most popular:

As for salaries, on average survey respondents earned $60,050 in 2006, an increase of 13.8 percent over the 2003 average of $52,750. The top categories (with percentage change since 2003) were: