Quick answer: A landscape architecture degree is the front half of a license, not a standalone credential. The national path is a LAAB-accredited degree from the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board, documented experience under a licensed landscape architect, and the Landscape Architect Registration Examination (LARE) through CLARB. Online delivery works for the lecture half; the design studio usually does not. Programs, the careers this degree opens, and what they pay are covered below.
What Does the Licensure Path Look Like?
Stage
What it is
Typical timing
LAAB accredited degree
A LAAB-accredited bachelor’s or master’s in landscape architecture, from the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board
Commonly five years undergraduate, or about three years for the graduate route
Qualifying experience
Progressive design work under a licensed landscape architect, documented on your board’s forms
Varies by state board
LARE sections
The Landscape Architect Registration Examination, administered through CLARB, covering inventory and analysis, planning and design, construction documentation, and grading and drainage
Section order set by each board
State registration
The board issues the license; continuing education requirements vary
Ongoing
Two things about that table matter more than the rest.
LAAB accreditation is the gate, not institutional accreditation. Institutional accreditation from a recognized institutional accreditor is what governs credit transfer and federal aid eligibility, and it is necessary. It is not the same thing as programmatic accreditation for licensure. Boards look for the LAAB accredited program. Confirm the specific program appears on the accredited list before you pay a deposit anywhere.
The rules are state law. Title acts, practice acts, experience totals and exam sequencing differ by state, and this site does not hold a sourced dataset of per-state requirements. Confirm with your state licensing board, in writing, what it accepts and what it counts from work you have already done.
Before you request information anywhere, confirm the specific program appears on the LAAB accredited list and ask exactly how the studio sequence is delivered - low-residency blocks, evening sessions, or hybrid terms. With that filter set, compare online landscape architecture programs enrolling now:
Colleges Offering This Degree
Every school listed is verified in federal IPEDS data both to award this degree and to offer programs that can be completed entirely by distance education at this level. Whether this exact degree is delivered fully online varies by school, so confirm the format before you apply.
How we rank schools – graduation rate, graduate earnings, cost and retention.
Advertising plays no part.
This page lists 10 schools, closest group first, then ordered by
BOC Score with the highest at the top.
10 of them carry a score.
LOCAL RANK
Location / proximity to this page
Defines the local group
Graduation rate how often students finish
30%
Median earnings, 10 years after entry whether it paid off
25%
Average net price what students actually pay after aid; lower ranks higher
20%
Retention rate how many come back for year two
15%
Fully online availability whether you can study while working
10%
Scores come from IPEDS (2024) and the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard.
Earnings are for all graduates of a school, not one program, so treat them as a signal
about the institution rather than about this subject.
Sponsored listings are paid placements and are labelled as such; they are separate from
this ranking and never change it. Read the full methodology.
How Much of This Degree Can Actually Be Earned Online?
Split the curriculum in two and the answer is clear.
The lecture half transfers to distance delivery without much loss:
Plant materials and horticulture. Species selection, hardiness, soil chemistry, establishment and maintenance requirements.
Grading, drainage and site engineering. Contour manipulation, stormwater management, earthwork calculation, and the math behind a surface that drains where you intended.
Construction documentation. Layout plans, planting plans, details, specifications and the drawing set a contractor bids from.
Professional practice. Contracts, liability, project delivery and the business of a design office.
History, theory and ecology. The context that separates a design decision from a preference.
The studio half does not transfer as cleanly. Studio is a critique format: you pin work on a wall, an instructor and your peers take it apart, and you redraw. Programs that serve working adults generally handle this with low-residency intensives, evening synchronous sessions, or hybrid terms rather than pure asynchronous delivery. That is a scheduling constraint worth confirming in detail before you enroll, especially if your field season and the residency blocks collide.
Software is the other practical question. A program worth the tuition should have you working in current site design tools - CAD for construction documents, GIS for site analysis, 3D modeling and rendering for presentation, and the grading and earthwork tools that turn a concept into a buildable surface. Ask what versions are taught and whether student licenses are included.
For how prior training and crew experience get evaluated, see college credit for apprenticeship and degree completion programs. If your employer runs any kind of study support, employer tuition assistance covers how those arrangements usually work.
Before you shortlist schools, it also helps to be precise about the job the license points at and what the ladder under it pays.
What These Careers Pay
Landscape architects earn a median of $79,870 (BLS OEWS, May 2025).
Landscape Architecture Degree at a Glance
Metric
Detail
Source
Median annual wage
$79,870 ($38.40 per hour)
BLS OEWS, May 2025
Wage range
$54,770 (10th pct) - $130,190 (90th pct)
BLS OEWS, May 2025
Employment
19,600 landscape architects nationwide
BLS OEWS, May 2025
Projected change (2024-34)
3.5%, about 1,700 openings per year
BLS Employment Projections, 2024-34
Typical credential
Bachelor’s or master’s in landscape architecture, LAAB accredited
LAAB and state licensing boards
License
Registration via qualifying experience and the LARE
Most degree pages on this site describe a jump. This one describes a promotion within the same industry.
Landscaping and groundskeeping is one of the largest occupations covered anywhere on this site: 952,640 people, at a median of $39,150 per year, or $18.82 per hour (BLS OEWS, May 2025). The first rung above it is crew supervision, where 130,760 first-line supervisors earn a median of $58,430. The rung above that is not a bigger crew. It is the person who drew the plan the crew is installing, and that person holds a license.
Rung
SOC
Median annual wage
90th pct
Employment
Landscaping and groundskeeping workers
37-3011
$39,150
$56,730
952,640
First-line supervisors of landscaping crews
37-1012
$58,430
$85,650
130,760
Landscape architects
17-1012
$79,870
$130,190
19,600
All figures BLS OEWS, May 2025.
Read the 90th percentile column rather than the medians. A crew supervisor at the top of the scale earns $85,650, which is below the $104,090 that landscape architects reach at the 75th percentile (BLS OEWS, May 2025). There is a ceiling on the installation side of this industry, and the license is what sits above it. The tradeoff is honest: 19,600 landscape architect jobs against 952,640 crew jobs means the rung above is far narrower than the rung below, and individual outcomes may vary.
What crew years are actually worth in this transition is more than most people assume. Plant material, soil behavior, drainage failures, how a grade reads on the ground versus on paper, what an installer can and cannot build from a drawing - that knowledge is the difference between a design that works and one that gets redrawn after the first heavy rain. It is also the part of the education that classroom students do not have.
How Does This Compare to the Adjacent Licenses?
Landscape architecture sits in a cluster of site-related licenses, and people arrive at it after considering the others.
Occupation
SOC
Median annual wage
10th pct
90th pct
Employment
Landscape architects
17-1012
$79,870
$54,770
$130,190
19,600
Surveyors
17-1022
$75,440
$46,880
$125,590
50,830
Urban and regional planners
19-3051
$89,320
$60,010
$134,490
44,230
All figures BLS OEWS, May 2025.
Surveying measures and certifies where things are; landscape architecture decides what goes there. Surveying is the more portable trade-to-license path in raw numbers, with 50,830 jobs against 19,600, and the field work counts directly toward the experience requirement. Compare it at online surveying degree.
Urban and regional planning pays a higher median at $89,320 and employs more than twice as many people, but it is policy and land use work rather than design work, and the entry credential is usually a master’s. The overlap with landscape architecture is real at the site planning scale.
The best-paying states and the biggest markets are not the same list. California leads on both, with 2,310 landscape architects at a median of $98,380, but Texas employs 1,450 at $89,220, Florida 1,210 at $79,650, North Carolina 1,080 at $83,420 and New York 920 at $87,360 (BLS OEWS, May 2025).
North Carolina is the outlier worth noting: a location quotient of 1.73 means landscape architects are about 1.7 times as concentrated there as in the average state labor market, on employment that ranks fourth nationally. Alabama’s high median sits on employment of just 230, so treat it as a thin cell rather than a relocation plan.
Because registration is state by state and this occupation is small, geography deserves more weight here than in a large field. Pick where you intend to practice first, read that board’s rules, then pick the program.
Is This Degree Worth It From a Landscape Crew?
The wage case is straightforward. Median pay runs $39,150 for crew work, $58,430 for crew supervision and $79,870 for licensed landscape architects, with the licensed path reaching $130,190 at the 90th percentile against $85,650 for supervisors (BLS OEWS, May 2025).
The honest case against is the shape of the occupation. There are 19,600 landscape architect jobs in the country and about 1,700 openings a year, most of them replacement rather than growth (BLS Employment Projections, 2024-34). This is a small, geographically concentrated profession. The degree is commonly five years, the studio sequence is difficult to compress, and the studio component resists the online delivery that makes other degrees on this site workable while employed.
Who it fits: someone already in the industry, in or near a metro with real design work, who wants to draw the plan rather than install it and is willing to spend several years getting there. Who it does not fit: someone looking for the fastest wage increase available from a landscape crew, which is more likely to be a supervisory role or an adjacent licensed trade. Is college worth it lays out that tradeoff in general terms. Individual outcomes may vary.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you earn a landscape architecture degree online?
Partly. The lecture side - plant science, grading and drainage, site engineering, professional practice - transfers to distance delivery well. The design studio does not transfer cleanly, because studio is built on desk critique and pinup review. Most programs that serve working adults run studio in low-residency blocks or evening sessions rather than fully asynchronously. Confirm the format before you enroll.
How much do landscape architects make?
The national median annual wage for landscape architects is $79,870, or $38.40 per hour (BLS OEWS, May 2025). The bottom 10 percent earn $54,770 or less and the top 10 percent earn $130,190 or more, across employment of 19,600 nationally.
Do you need a license to work as a landscape architect?
To use the title and to take responsible charge of the work, yes, in most states. The national framework is a LAAB-accredited degree from the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board, documented experience under a licensed landscape architect, and the Landscape Architect Registration Examination administered through CLARB. Requirements are set state by state, so confirm the specifics with your state licensing board.
What is the difference between a landscape architect and a landscape contractor?
A landscape contractor installs and maintains the work. A licensed landscape architect designs it, stamps drawings, and takes professional responsibility for grading, drainage and site layout that has to satisfy a plan reviewer. The pay reflects that split: a median of $79,870 for landscape architects against $58,430 for first-line supervisors of landscaping and groundskeeping crews (BLS OEWS, May 2025).
What is the LARE?
The Landscape Architect Registration Examination is the national licensing exam, administered through the Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards. It is divided into sections covering inventory and analysis, planning and design, design and construction documentation, and grading and drainage. Section order and eligibility rules are set by each state board.
Is landscape architecture a growing field?
Employment is projected to change by 3.5% from 2024 to 2034, with about 1,700 openings per year (BLS Employment Projections, 2024-34). It is a small occupation, so most of those openings come from replacement rather than growth, and geography matters more than in larger fields.
How long does a landscape architecture degree take?
The accredited undergraduate degree is commonly five years rather than four, because studio sequences stack. A graduate route for someone who already holds a bachelor's in another field typically runs three years. Prior college credit, horticulture coursework and documented crew experience can shorten the classroom side but rarely the studio sequence. Request a written transfer evaluation before you commit.
Is this a realistic step up from a landscape crew job?
It is one of the few design licenses that sits directly on top of a trade this site already covers. Landscaping and groundskeeping employs 952,640 people at a median of $39,150, and crew supervisors earn a median of $58,430 (BLS OEWS, May 2025). The degree and license are what move that work from installing a plan to drawing one. It is a multi-year commitment, and individual outcomes may vary.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 - Landscape Architects (SOC 17-1012), First-Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping Workers (SOC 37-1012), Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers (SOC 37-3011), Surveyors (SOC 17-1022), Urban and Regional Planners (SOC 19-3051)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections, 2024-34
Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board (LAAB) program accreditation
Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards (CLARB), Landscape Architect Registration Examination (LARE)
About this guide: Researched and written by the TradeCareerPath Editorial Team. Our editorial team researches and sources every trade school and career guide using federal labor and education data, including BLS OEWS and Employment Projections, DOL apprenticeship records, IPEDS, College Scorecard, and state licensing boards. We follow the editorial standards documented at /editorial-policy/.
