“The safety profession wears on you. Safety pros need more support in terms of staffing. Companies tend to lean more and more on us and it’s not easy to avoid burnout.”
“I feel incredibly fortunate to work with my team to improve safety every day. We have such an important job that is sometimes rather thankless and unnoticed. Good safety is, unfortunately, often invisible.”
“I went into this field to help people and keep them safe. The field sounded like it was all about protecting the less fortunate and those who didn't have much of a voice. Unfortunately in my experience it’s more about protecting the company and making them look good.”
“It is impossible to do all of the required safety training and be productive. You’d lose three months of work time if you followed all best training practices.”
“Being a safety professional has been a very rewarding profession for me. It has been both personally and professionally satisfying.”
—comments posted by respondents to the 2024 National Safety and Salary Survey
When your job title includes the word “safety” in it, it’s fair to say that you come to work every day recognizing that something bad could conceivably happen and that you need to prevent it from happening. Not only that, but your goal of keeping the workplace safe is often at odds (though not stated quite so directly) with the goals of other operations, including production, purchasing and finance. Many EHS professionals consider what they do as more of a mission rather than merely a job, which can lead to frustrations when others in the company or organization see “workplace safety” as more of a budgetary line item rather than a higher calling.
Everybody talks about safety, but safety leaders often seem to be the only ones doing anything about it. Or at least it sometimes seems that way, especially if you’re in an environment that places a higher value on productivity and profits than on worker safety. It’s an ongoing challenge to keep workers safe and healthy, and workplaces free from hazards and accidents, and nobody knows that better—and nobody can tell that story better—than the EHS professionals themselves.
That’s the motivation behind the EHS Today 2024 National Safety and Salary Survey—providing safety leaders a platform, so to speak, to share, opine and vent about their jobs. This, then, is our annual report on the survey results.
Based on responses from 631 EHS professionals, we can tell you that roughly half of all safety leaders in the United States (49%) manage a staff, though most likely a very small staff (between 1 and 9 people); however, 5% are responsible for 50 or more people. Looking at it the other way, the other half (51%) of all respondents have nobody else helping them keep their workplaces safe. Little wonder, then, that so many respondents wondered how seriously their companies took safety if they only had one person managing it.
If you’re curious as to what a “typical safety leader” looks like, we ran some cross-comparisons on many of the categories to identify the most frequent responses to our various demographic questions. So we can tell you that the prototypical safety leader has the job title of EHS manager, is a white male in his 50s, lives in the Midwest, has more than 20 years of experience, works in a manufacturing plant or facility, earns $105,890, and in the past year received a raise between 3-5%.
In fact, comparing this year’s average salary to last year’s, salaries as a whole were up 6%, which is about twice that of the average raise throughout the U.S. economy, according to Indeed. If your raise was nowhere near that big, well, as we said, it’s an average—your mileage may vary.
WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING?
Let’s get a little bit more specific, starting with job titles. “Safety leader” is the shorthand description we usually use, but almost nobody actually has that exact title. In the chart labeled, “Average Salary by Job Responsibility,” you’ll see that 29% have the title of EHS manager, EHS supervisor or an equivalent title, and they earn, on average, $103,798. EHS professionals (which generally means somebody without direct reports) make up the second biggest bloc among our respondents at 25% of the total, and they earn $90,390. EHS directors or VPs account for 16%, the third-largest group, and they earn $144,388.
The largest percentage of respondents (29%) work in manufacturing facilities—either in light manufacturing industries (e.g., apparel, consumer electronics) or heavy manufacturing industries (e.g., automotive, aerospace). Light manufacturing respondents earn $98,960, while heavy manufacturing respondents earn $111,740. The construction industry accounts for 14% of all respondents, and they earn an average of $109,139. No other industry or sector had more than 10% of all respondents; the closest is government workers, with 7% of the total and an average salary of $99,525.
Another question that produced a wide range of answers is: What areas are you responsible for? The number one answer, as you would expect, is safety (95%), followed by occupational health (75%) and risk management (68%).
WHERE DO YOU WORK?
Geographically speaking, since the largest number of respondents work in manufacturing, it stands to reason that the North Central region (aka the Midwest) is also home to the largest percentage of safety leaders (30%). Their average salary is $104,936, which puts them roughly in the middle range of salaries. The Pacific region (12%) has the largest average salary, at $120,009, followed by the Mountain region (10%) and a salary of $109,253. The lowest average salary is in New England, $89,884, which also has the fewest number of safety leaders, at 4%.
Safety leaders, as noted earlier, are most likely to be found in a manufacturing plant or facility (39%). The next most likely work environments for safety people are in a corporate office (25%), or at a worksite or construction site (10%).
WHO ARE YOU? AND DO YOU LIKE WHAT YOU DO?
More than two-thirds (69%) of all respondents have more than 10 years of experience, and more than one-third (39%) have more than 20 years of experience. The more experience you have, predictably, the higher the salary: those with less than five years of experience earn $77,585, while safety leaders with more than 20 years earn $122,804.
Similarly, the older you are, the more you make. Those younger than 25 (admittedly, only 1% of respondents) average $70,625, whereas those who are 65 or older (12%) earn $117,986. The majority of all respondents, reflecting the fact that EHS Today’s audience is largely made up of safety leaders with managerial responsibility, are 45 or older (73%). And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a frequently cited challenge among respondents is the need to attract new talent to the safety profession.
The gender gap does seem to be narrowing, which is good news. Males now account for two-thirds (67%) of all safety jobs, which is down from 70% a year ago, and the gap in salary between males and females is half of what it was in 2023, when males were making nearly $13,000 more than females. This year males earn $108,072 while females earn $102,600—a difference of $5,472. As more women enter the safety profession, we should hopefully see that gap narrow even more.
When it comes to ethnic diversity, not much has really changed since last year, with 81% of all respondents describing themselves as Whites/Caucasians (it was 82% in 2023), and earning $106,505. The next-largest group—Hispanic/Latino—accounts for 8% (up from 7% in 2023), and earning $100,077.
Education is very important to safety leaders, as 74% of respondents have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. Correspondingly, the salaries reflect that, as those with a doctorate (2%) earn the most, $165,621, followed by those with a master’s (27%) at $119,495. Those with a bachelor’s degree, the largest group among respondents (36%), earned $104,479.
All told, taking into account all of the many challenges and frustrations that they face, 82% of respondents nevertheless said they’re either satisfied or very satisfied with the EHS profession. Only 4% said they’re unsatisfied, and hardly anybody—actually only one person out of the 631 respondents—said they’re very unsatisfied. That reflects well on the EHS profession and on the people who are championing safety cultures within their workplaces.
The “satisfaction meter” dips a little bit when it comes to their current jobs, though, as 73% said they’re satisfied or very satisfied with where they’re working and what they’re doing, representing a difference of 9% between satisfaction with the safety profession and the jobs they’re doing right now. Also, 9% said they are unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with their jobs, which would include dissatisfaction with their salaries.
Thank you to everybody who responded to our survey this year. We’ll be posting more charts and comments on the ehstoday.com website, and we’re also extending an open invitation to all of you who’d like to add your own comments. And finally, thanks to all of you for keeping us safe!
If you could change one thing about your job, what would it be?
• The pay. I’m definitely underpaid.
• Greater input of safety into operations, more than just the flavor of the month.
• More staff—there is too much to do for one person. It doesn’t mesh with the message of safety as a company priority.
• EHS roles tend to be a “box of misfit toys” in that new responsibilities continue to be added to scope.
• More of us need to push back against DEI and other Marxist concepts that destroy employee morale.
• The political game between operations and safety and the corporate staff.
• Need a better SMS.
• More financial resources to devote to safety initiatives.
• The environment portion of my job is often put on the back burner, outside of compliance requirements. We should all focus on it as a concern for our planet.
• More certification options for those who do not have college degrees.
• To have a clear understanding of where I fit in the organization.
• I ain’t changin’ nothing. I am lovin’ it.
