Arborist salary in Washington and Oregon: what tree trimmers earn (2025 data)

How much do arborists make in Washington and Oregon?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish an arborist salary under that name. Its closest occupation is tree trimmers and pruners (code 37-3013), and the May 2025 wage survey puts Oregon’s mean at $35.40 an hour across 1,610 jobs and Washington’s at $32.20 across 700 jobs. The medians, the pay of the worker in the middle, are $36.27 in Oregon and $30.70 in Washington.

Both states sit well above the national figures: a $26.91 mean and a $24.50 median across 55,160 jobs. Oregon’s mean is 32% higher than the U.S. mean and Washington’s is 20% higher. At 2,080 hours, the full-time year BLS uses for its own annual figures, Oregon’s mean works out to $73,632, Washington’s to $66,976 and the national mean to $55,973.

Treat the job counts as rough; the wages are much firmer. BLS publishes a relative standard error for each estimate: 17.1% for Oregon’s employment count and 22.9% for Washington’s, but only 2.8% and 6.3% for the two mean wages. The May 2025 figures pool six survey panels collected from November 2022 through May 2025, so they describe the last three years more than a single month.

Arborist salary by metro area

Seven Washington and Oregon metro areas have a tree-trimmer row in the May 2025 data, and six of them have published wages. Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro is the big market, with 1,160 jobs and a $35.04 mean; the metro crosses the Columbia, so Vancouver-area workers are in that figure. Salem ($34.49), Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue ($33.85), Eugene-Springfield ($33.56) and Bend ($33.32) sit within $1.17 of each other.

Spokane is the outlier. Its $25.94 mean and $23.98 median are below the national figures and $7.91 an hour under Seattle’s mean, a gap of $16,453 a year at 2,080 hours. The highest averages are outside the metros: BLS’s Western Washington nonmetropolitan area averages $38.11 (job count not published) and its Coast Oregon nonmetropolitan area $37.56 across 80 jobs.

The map has holes. BLS counts 140 tree-trimmer jobs in the Medford metro but did not release wages there, even though Medford has the third-highest concentration of these jobs of any U.S. metro with published employment, 4.55 times the national rate. There is no tree-trimmer row at all for Bellingham, Bremerton, Olympia, Mount Vernon, Longview, Kennewick-Richland, Yakima, Wenatchee, Walla Walla, Corvallis, Albany or Grants Pass; use the state figure there.

Tree trimmer salary ranges, from entry level to the top 10%

Percentiles show the spread better than averages. In Oregon a tenth of tree trimmers earn less than $24.63 an hour and a tenth earn more than $45.42; in Washington the cutoffs are $21.41 and $45.01. Oregon’s median ($36.27) is higher than its mean, so at least half the state’s tree trimmers make more than the average.

Washington’s pay is more spread out. Its 25th percentile, $23.53, is $6.47 below Oregon’s $30.00, yet the two states’ 90th percentiles are only 41 cents apart. The best-paid tenth in the Coast Oregon nonmetro area start at $58.73 an hour, the highest 90th percentile anywhere in either state.

Source: BLS OEWS May 2025, Tree Trimmers and Pruners (37-3013), hourly wages by percentile, checked 2026-10-02.

For a yearly salary, multiply by 2,080 hours, as BLS does. The table below is that arithmetic. It assumes a full-time, year-round schedule; BLS notes that grounds work gets busier in spring, summer and fall, so a seasonal worker’s real total can be lower.

Calculation: BLS hourly wage × 2,080 hours, by Westcoast-Tree.org. BLS’s own annual columns can differ by up to about $15 because of rounding.

How Oregon and Washington rank against other states

Of the 49 states with a published estimate, Oregon has the highest mean wage for tree trimmers and Washington the fourth highest, behind Minnesota ($35.03) and New Jersey ($33.54). At the 90th percentile the two states rank first and second, and Oregon’s median ranks second only to Minnesota’s.

Oregon also has an unusual number of these jobs for its size: 0.82 per 1,000 jobs of all kinds, a location quotient of 2.30. BLS defines that ratio against the nation, so the occupation is 2.3 times as concentrated in Oregon as in the U.S. as a whole; only West Virginia and Vermont rank higher among the 39 states with published employment. Washington’s quotient is 0.55.

Metro rankings tell the same story. Among 144 metro areas with a published mean wage, Portland ranks 4th, Salem 6th, Seattle 8th, Eugene 9th and Bend 11th, while Spokane is 66th. Portland’s 1,160 jobs are the fifth most of any metro, behind Los Angeles, Houston, Philadelphia and Sacramento.

Who counts as an arborist in the wage data

In federal data, arborist is a job title, not an occupation. The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook says tree trimmers and pruners are “also called arborists,” and O*NET lists Arborist alongside Climber, Groundsman, Grounds Worker, Plant Health Care Technician and Tree Trimmer among the titles workers in this occupation report. Its task list runs from feeding the chipper to supervising and training a crew, so the averages blend ground crew, climbers and crew leaders.

Arborists who mainly consult, write tree risk reports or manage a city’s urban forest do work the tree-trimmer description does not cover; ISA’s own list of arborist services includes consulting, legal work and tree risk assessment alongside pruning and removal. Their pay is not well measured by these figures.

The pay also reflects risky, physical work. In O*NET’s survey of the occupation, 48% of workers said they are exposed to high places every day, and BLS notes that grounds maintenance work has one of the highest fatality rates of any occupation. OSHA’s tree-care hazard page lists Washington fatality investigations of a worker who fell from a boom lift while trimming and a driver crushed by a chip truck that rolled away; that risk is why felling a big tree is usually not a DIY job, as the guide on how to cut down a tree explains.

Which arborist jobs pay more?

Employer type moves pay more than the job title does. Nationally, 89.6% of tree trimmer jobs are with landscaping-services companies, where the mean is $26.56 an hour. Local governments, state governments, electric utilities and power-line construction contractors pay $4.07 to $5.34 more. BLS publishes these industry splits only for the nation, not for Washington or Oregon.

Utility line clearance is the clearest Northwest example, because its union scale is public. The agreement between Asplundh Tree Expert and IBEW Local 125 covers Clark, Klickitat and Skamania counties in Washington and 23 Oregon counties, including Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas and Marion. Its base rates effective January 1, 2026 are $19.52 an hour for a flagger, $23.53 for a groundman, $38.41 for a journeyman tree trimmer and $44.25 for a foreman, with overtime at double time.

Credentials show up directly in that scale. A pesticide applicator license and a commercial driver’s license add $4.56 an hour at journeyman level, to $42.97, and $5.26 for a foreman. Apprentices start at 75% of the journeyman rate and step up every six months; the NW Line JATC describes its tree trimmer apprenticeship as about two years and 4,000 hours. Utility rules on who may work near lines are collected under utility tree trimming.

ISA certification works differently: it gates work rather than setting a rate. Seattle lets only registered Tree Service Providers do commercial tree work such as removing a tree 6 inches or more in diameter or a live branch 4 inches or larger, and a company needs at least one ISA Certified Arborist to register; hazard assessments also call for ISA’s Tree Risk Assessment Qualification (TRAQ). What an arborist does for a homeowner, and the path to certification in how to become an arborist, are covered separately.

Moving up usually means running a crew or a business. BLS notes that grounds workers may advance to crew leader or supervisor, or start their own company, and the owners of unincorporated companies drop out of these wage numbers entirely.

Where the arborist jobs are: tree and landscaping employers by county

For where the employers are, the best county-level source is the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns. It counts establishments with paid employees in landscaping services (NAICS 561730), an industry whose index entries include arborist services, tree trimming and tree removal, alongside landscape care, maintenance and installation. Read it as the broader landscaping industry, not tree care alone.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 561730 Landscaping Services, checked 2026-10-02. Thirteen of the 75 counties have no published row.

King, Snohomish and Pierce counties hold 1,583 establishments between them, and the four Portland-area counties in the table (Washington, Multnomah, Clackamas and Clark) hold 923. Note the mismatch with the wage survey: Washington’s published counties hold 69% more landscaping establishments than Oregon’s, yet BLS counts fewer than half as many tree-trimmer jobs in Washington. The two programs measure different things, and Washington’s job count carries the larger error margin, so neither settles how many people climb trees for a living.

Wages are not prices: from a $35 wage to a $225 crew-hour

A homeowner’s quote is not the climber’s wage. This site’s modeled prices start from the same BLS state means and build them up to a crew-hour, as shown on the methodology page:

1. Start with the BLS mean wage$35.40 an hour in Oregon and $32.20 in Washington, May 2025.
2. Add burden and overheadMultiply by 1.6 for payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance and the office: $56.64 and $51.52 per worker-hour.
3. Staff a three-person crewA climber or operator and two groundworkers: $169.92 and $154.56 an hour.
4. Add the equipmentAbout $55 an hour for the chipper, chip truck, saws and fuel brings the totals to about $225 per crew-hour in Oregon and $210 in Washington.

Modeled estimate, not quotes (method): at those crew rates the model prices a 25–50 ft removal, 4–8 crew-hours, at $900–$1,800 in Oregon and $850–$1,700 in Washington. The full table is on tree removal cost and the pruning version on tree trimming cost.

Reading the index: the BLS mean includes utility line-clearance contractors and municipal crews, so it is a measure of labor costs in each state, not the hourly rate a small residential crew pays its climber.