Why landman day rates haven't moved in twenty years
I stopped writing here for about two years. Most of you know that I’ve got young kids, and that should be explanation enough, but “life gets in the way” only goes so far. The reality is that my day job has sucked up all of my time. As it turns out, doing good land work and being efficient with your time is something that has become a rarity in our industry…I’m certainly happy to be in demand, but the cost of growing MYR has been…leaving LandmanLife to stagnate.
Here is why I came back.
The industry is worse for the people doing the work than it was when I started this site sixteen years ago, and the loudest voices in it are still telling everyone it is fine. Rates are down. The work is harder. The reports are longer. The expectations are higher. Every landman I know has adjusted to it quietly, one project at a time, because the alternative was not working. A lot of good landmen have moved into other industries, and I don’t think they are ever coming back.
I have written that before. In August 2023 I published How the Shale Boom Ruined Landmen and said day rates were lower than they had been ten years earlier while the work got harder. I said guys who did not need the money were asking $800 a day and were probably worth it, and that no brokerage would pay it. That was a rant. I had no numbers. It was the truth as far as I could see it from inside a truck.
Three years later, the American Association of Professional Landmen published the numbers.
Before I go further: AAPL has LandmanLife blocked on their social media accounts because they did not care for my criticism. I am about to spend this entire post citing their data. Both of those things are true and neither one changes the other. Their survey work is the best that exists. Keep that in mind when you get to the part about who actually answers those surveys.
The number that should end the argument
AAPL surveys its membership every two years and has since 1990. The 2026 study reports total compensation for independent contractors against in house landmen, back to 2000.
Independent contractor median, 2000: $65,000. In 2025: $104,000.
That looks like a raise. It is not. Adjust it for inflation and the 2000 figure is about $126,000 in today’s money. The independent landman’s median pay fell roughly 17% in real terms across twenty-five years.
Over the same twenty-five years, the median in house landman went from $81,000 to $165,000. Roughly flat in real terms, maybe a little ahead.
Same profession. Same quarter century. One group held even. The other took a pay cut and was told it was a good market.
Where it actually breaks: year eleven
The number that stopped me is not the day rate. It is this, from the same study, median total compensation by years of experience:
| Experience | In house landman | Independent |
|---|---|---|
| 0-5 years | $103,477 | $67,500 |
| 6-10 | $124,762 | $94,500 |
| 11-15 | $153,200 | $105,303 |
| 16-20 | $185,000 | $107,500 |
| 21-24 | $180,000 | $106,000 |
| 25-29 | $216,500 | $103,000 |
| 30+ | $187,000 | $110,000 |
Read the right-hand column twice.
An independent landman with eleven years in makes $105,303. An independent landman with twenty-seven years in makes $103,000. Sixteen more years of experience, sixteen more years of knowing which clerk to ask and which chain to distrust and which landowner will sue you, and the median goes down.
The in house landman gains $63,000 over that same stretch.
That is not a compensation problem. That is a career with no back half. And it explains something I have watched happen to people I like for fifteen years without having the words for it: the good ones do not burn out, they top out. Then they leave, or they stop caring, and everyone calls it attitude.
The day rate is the machine that does it
Day rates by experience, from the same study, share of each group charging each rate. The rookies are capped: nobody with under five years reports above $425, and 72% of them are at $300 or less. From year eleven onward the most common rate is $400, and it is still $400 at thirty years.
There is a ceiling and it is real. About 12% of landmen with thirty-plus years bill $700 or more.
I think I know what separates them, and it is not skill. It is whether somebody else can do your job tomorrow. Preparing runsheets, MORs, or standard reports is something that almost all of us have done, and probably still do somewhat regularly. Sure you can get more efficient, and better at catching things that look off - so the experience gain DOES add some value. That value usually ends up translating to less than a fraction of a percent of the big picture though. Runsheet is done a week earlier than expected? Great, move on to the next one. Title landmen are not going to be doing NRI/WI calculations, finding title defects and inputting them into the formula for allocated value, or negotiating complex contracts between landowners and operators…THOSE skills are ones that demand a higher price because far fewer people possess them, and to be honest, most people don’t want to be doing that kind of work anyways.
Which is where two other numbers in AAPL’s data stop looking like trivia.
The 2026 study breaks compensation down by region. Independent contractors whose primary region is the Permian Basin average $113,678. Contractors who answer “all the U.S.” average $128,273. The richest oil field in the world pays its contract landmen about fifteen thousand dollars a year less than being willing to work anywhere.
That reads backwards until you think about crews. The Permian is where the hundred-person projects are. It is the most industrialized land work in the country, which makes it the most interchangeable land work in the country. The guy who works everywhere is not on a crew. He gets called for a specific problem, which means he is the only person on it, which means he sets his price.
Same mechanism, third piece of evidence: the Gulf Coast has the widest gap between in house landmen and contractors of any region, $198,412 against $114,026.
So the story is not that the shale boom paid badly. It paid great, briefly. The story is that the shale boom industrialized land work, and industrialized labor does not negotiate. I called them warm bodies in 2023 and thought I was describing the people. I was describing what the job had turned them into.
For everyone else the day rate does exactly what a day rate is built to do. It prices your time. And every year we all got better at using less time. Records went digital. AAPL’s own committee puts the mileage, hotel, meal and copy expenses that operators used to reimburse at “easily exceed $250/day,” and says remote access to data made most of it unnecessary.
So the operator kept the $250. The landman bought the software subscriptions that made it possible. And because we bill by the day, getting faster made us poorer.
That is the whole trap in one sentence, and it predates every downturn in this post.
My rates are not typical, and that is the point
Before the table, the disclaimer that makes it useful.
I was not on a crew for most of my career. I worked as a genuine independent for Buckaroo Fuel, and for most of it I was the only landman on a prospect, cradle to grave. That is a different job from what most contract landmen were doing during the boom, and it is the reason my rate held up as well as it did.
If you are the only landman on a prospect and you have been on it since the first runsheet, you are not interchangeable. Replacing you costs the operator real time and real risk. That is pricing power, and it is the only pricing power a contract landman has ever had.
Now put that next to a crew of a hundred landmen on a big shale project, where any of the hundred can do what any other one does. That is not a workforce, that is a commodity. And a broker with a hundred interchangeable people has every incentive to bid the rate down, because the only thing separating his bid from the next broker’s is price, and the savings come out of the crew rather than his margin.
That is where wages actually got pushed down. Not by the busts. By fungibility.
So read my numbers as the control case, not the average. This is what happened to someone who stayed hard to replace. It is the good outcome.
Here is my own rate, every year since I started in 2010. The right-hand column is what that rate is worth in today’s money.
| Year | My day rate | In 2026 dollars |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | $175 | $268 |
| 2011 | $275 | $408 |
| 2012 | $325 | $473 |
| 2013 | $350 | $502 |
| 2014-2016 | $375 | $529 to $522 |
| 2017, to late | $400 | $545 |
| late 2017 | $350 | $477 |
| 2018 | $375 | $499 |
| 2019-2021 | $400 | $523 down to $493 |
| 2022-now | $500 | $571 down to $500 |
The best I ever did as somebody else’s contractor was 2017, and I did not know it at the time. That $400, working directly for one operator as the only landman on the prospect, is $545 in today’s money. I charge $500 now. Nine years later, at the highest number I have ever billed, I am 8% behind where I was as a contract landman.
My actual peak was 2022, the year I started MYR, when $500 was worth $571. I have not raised my own rate since. So even the owner’s number has quietly given back 12% while sitting still.
Then look at what happened in late 2017. I left the direct work, took a seat on a crew, and went from $400 to $350. A 12.5% cut, immediately, for doing the same trade.
I did not experience that as a market event. I experienced it as taking a job. But it is the cleanest illustration of the thing I described above that I could possibly give you: the day I became interchangeable, my rate fell 12.5%, and nobody had to do anything to me for it to happen. That is just what a crew seat is worth.
It took repeated negotiation to claw back $25 of it. Not a raise, a partial restoration, and I had to ask more than once for twenty-five dollars.
And I never got back to $400 by my rate going up. I got back to $400 in early 2019 by changing what I did, moving into surface work in south Texas. That is not a raise either. That is switching markets because the one you are in has stopped paying.
Then I held $400 from 2019 through 2021. Same number three years running, worth $523 at the start and $493 by the end. I gave back thirty dollars a day without a single conversation about money.
Here is the line I keep coming back to. In twelve years as somebody else’s contract landman, I never once got above $400 a day. The only thing that ever moved me past it was starting my own company.
If you had asked me during any of those years whether I was doing all right, I probably would have said yes. My rate keeps going up.
Now read the right-hand column.
In 2013 I charged $350, which is $502 in today’s money. Today I charge $500. Thirteen years of additional experience, a 43% raise on paper, and zero-point-three percent in real terms. Call it flat, because it is flat.
It gets worse than flat. My best year was 2019, when $425 was worth $555 today. I am currently about 10% below my own 2019 peak while charging my highest number ever.
And every real gain I have ever made happened in my first four years, going from $268 to $502 in today’s money between 2010 and 2013. Rookie to competent. After that, nothing. AAPL’s data says the independent median plateaus around year eleven. Mine plateaued at year four.
So there are two mechanisms, and I have now been through both.
The cut is the loud one. It happens on crews, because a broker holding a hundred interchangeable people has somewhere to take it from. In 2020 I wrote that you could turn a good landman into a lazy one by cutting him from $500 to $300 and handing him the hard work anyway. Mine was $400 to $350 and I took it voluntarily by changing jobs, which is the same transaction wearing better clothes.
The freeze is the quiet one, and it does more damage. Three years at $375 through the 2014 to 2016 bust. Four years at $400 from 2019 through 2022, covering COVID and the inflation after it. A freeze sends no notice. There is nothing to be angry about on any particular Tuesday. You are still making your highest number ever while the number quietly buys less every month, and it lands hardest in exactly the years you are too worried about having work to bring up money. Once you realize it though, the resentment starts to build.
That is how you take a 17% pay cut across a career and never once notice you agreed to it.
And to answer the obvious question: no, nobody ever moved me up on their own. Not once in sixteen years. Every number in that table that went up went up because I went and got it, or because I changed jobs. The one place that never raised me was the one place I did not ask, and that was because I was already at the top of their scale. More on that below.
Nobody wanted a swiss army knife
There is a second half to the fungibility problem and it is the part I think does the most damage, because it is invisible while it is happening to you.
Runsheets, MORs, leasing, curative, due diligence, surface. Those are not six jobs. They are six views of the same job, and each one teaches you something the others need. You cannot really run good title without understanding what curative is going to have to fix. You cannot write a decent MOR without knowing how the lease got taken.
The early shale days broke that apart. Volume was so high that the efficient thing was to put a landman on one station and leave him there. So a whole generation of landmen spent ten years doing runsheets. Only runsheets. Not because they were incapable of the rest, but because there was always another runsheet and nobody was going to pay them to learn leasing on the clock.
That does two things at once, and the combination is brutal.
Inside your station you are interchangeable, because a hundred other people do exactly what you do. So you have no pricing power. And across stations you are not transferable, because you never got to learn the neighboring work. So you have no exit either. Replaceable and trapped at the same time. That is the worst position a skilled worker can occupy, and the industry built it by accident while optimizing for throughput. I’m sure at the time it was considered “building efficiencies.”
I got out of that by luck and by circumstance, not by being smarter. Working one prospect cradle to grave meant I had to learn a little of everything, because there was nobody else to hand it to. That is the whole reason I had an escape hatch in 2019. When the crew work stopped paying, I could move into surface work in south Texas. A landman with ten years of nothing but runsheets could not have made that move.
Now here is the part that still annoys me. That breadth counted against me the last time I was looking for work. Nobody wanted somebody who had done all of it. They wanted ten years of the exact station. No one wanted a swiss army knife, everyone wanted a scalpel.
Which tells you what the hiring market actually rewards, and it is not capability. It is legibility. A scalpel is easy to slot into a crew. A swiss army knife requires somebody to think about where you go. So the market keeps selecting for the trait that removes your bargaining power, and then the same market wonders aloud why there is no experienced talent left. AAPL’s own data has a version of this in it: every field landman surveyed runs title, but only about half do due diligence or leasing, and a quarter do mineral buying.
So breadth does not pay a premium. It pays in optionality, which is worth nothing right up until the day it is worth everything. I cannot prove that trade is correct for you. I can tell you it is the only reason I am still in this business.
Now AI is threatening to make EVERYTHING faster, more efficient, cheaper, and…automated. That threat is real. The scalpel is the most automatable job in land. Ten years of only runsheets is ten years of the exact task the machines are coming for first. It’s the low hanging fruit. People look at it and think “we’ll save so much money doing this.” Something they miss with that calculation - displacing more landmen when our industry is already starved for quality people.
The part that is on us
Here is where I have to be fair, because the data does not only indict the operators.
AAPL ran a separate Field Landman Study in April 2026. Two findings sit next to each other.
About 64% of field landmen have never asked for a raise.
Of the ones who did ask, roughly 91% got it.
Two thirds never asked, and asking worked nine times in ten.
I am in both halves of that number and neither one is flattering.
At Buckaroo Fuel I never asked, and not out of fear. I was already at the top of what they paid a landman, and I was happy, and I was learning six things at once. Twenty-five dollars a day was not worth pushing for against a job that was teaching me the whole trade. I would make that trade again.
Then I took the crew seat, and the same twenty-five dollars I had not bothered to chase became twenty-five dollars I had to ask for more than once to get.
So hold those two facts together, because the survey cannot. Some of that 64% are not timid. Some of them are already at the top of a scale that does not go any higher, which is a ceiling and not a failure of nerve. Some are trading money for something they want more, which is a real decision and not a mistake. And the 91% who got something counts whether anything moved, not whether what came back was fair. Mine moved by twenty-five dollars.
“Just ask” is not the lesson. The lesson is that almost nobody knows what the scale even is, which is the entire reason I am asking you for numbers at the bottom of this post.
I do not have a comfortable way to write that sentence, because I have been on both sides of it. I have been the contractor who did not ask. I run a brokerage now, and I have been the guy on the other end of a bid deciding what to put on a line. Since Chris and I founded MYR, we have routinely turned down potential clients that wouldn’t agree to our terms. I always explain that we pay our landmen better than the other brokers they have capped at lower rates, and I am not willing to lower my landmen’s pay because they are worth more than we are even capable of paying them. Most of the time it’s an amicable disagreement, we politely stand our ground and let them know they can always give us a call in the future if they need help - but our rates won’t go lower. On a few occasions, potential clients have been shocked that their standard “the best we can pay is X” hook didn’t work. They state that “every other broker accepts this rate” and think that means all of us have the same contractors, work output, and billing procedures. None of those are the same across the board.
And the brokerages are not innocent, mine included.
So here is what mine has actually done, because I do not get to make this argument and then decline to answer it. Over the past four years MYR has raised individual contractors day rates multiple times. Not across the board, we are selective with who and when to raise a rate, but we do our best to reward consistency. We have not been able to raise what we charge our clients over the same period. That difference came out of our margin, which is a choice we made to keep good landmen working, and it is not a strategy that survives indefinitely.
I am not telling you that to look generous. I am telling you because of what it locates. The ceiling is not sitting with the broker, it is sitting with the client. A brokerage that wants to pay its people more can do it exactly until the spread runs out, and then it stops, and then you are back to the hundred-person crew logic. Which means “brokers should just pay more” is not the answer either. The thing that has to change is what land work is billed for, and I have opinions about that which belong in a different post.
AAPL asked contractors and operators the same questions separately. Contractors were uniform in saying they fear that raising rates loses work to a cheaper competitor. The operators said their hiring decisions are driven by work quality, ethics and how a landman represents the company, not by billing rate. I have plenty of first hand experience proving that work quality is far lower on most operators list than billing rates.
Maybe the operators are being generous about themselves. The land manager who answers a survey and the procurement group that awards the contract are not the same people. But it is worth sitting with: we have been cutting each other’s rates against a threat the buyers claim is not the deciding factor. And when a brokerage shaves fifty dollars off a bid, it usually comes off the field landman, not off the brokerage.
Who answers these surveys
I promised to come back to this.
AAPL sent the 2026 survey to 10,023 members. About 13% answered. Sixty percent of the people who answered hold an AAPL certification. Between 2020 and 2024 the respondent mix flipped, from 56% independent contractors down to 38%, while in house landmen went from 33% to 54%.
So this is not a picture of the profession. It is a picture of the members most invested in the association, and that group is more credentialed and more likely to be salaried. In this very study, holding a CPL is worth about $13,000 of median income. I know plenty of in house CPLs that would disagree with that number though.
Which means the numbers above are the optimistic version. The landman charging $275 a day is the one who cannot justify dues, so he is not in the data at all. He gains nothing from being an AAPL member.
Their [AAPL] own figures, gathered from their own most engaged members, and the profession is still underwater. It is worse than they printed.
I will also say the obvious thing about the source. AAPL published this while asking operators to raise day rates, which means they published a number against their own comfort, and that is the least suspicious version of a self-interested report. My problem with them is not the data. It is that their answer to a pay crisis is more education, more certification and more committees. That is the ladder recommending more ladder. And it is why blocking the field landman blog that said all this in 2023 is not just petty, it is the exact communication gap their own report identifies. Their words: “Missing is clear communication among the individuals within the two groups.”
What I am doing about it, and what I need from you
Nobody has ever measured the landmen who are not in AAPL. That is most of us.
So I am running a survey. It is five questions and it takes under a minute. Your current day rate, your years of experience, the states you work, whether you are an AAPL member, and the last time your rate changed.
That last one is the whole point. Nobody has ever published it, and it is the only way to prove or kill the ratchet.
It is anonymous. I am not asking who your clients are and I would not print it if you told me. It is backward-looking and it gets published in wide bands, because a group of competitors trading current rate information is a thing you do carefully or not at all.
It takes about a minute. Five questions plus two, none of them about who you are.
If enough of you answer, we get the first honest number this industry has ever had about what field work actually pays. If enough of you answer, it happens every year.
That is what I came back for. The industry is still struggling, and the people who benefit from nobody saying why have had a very quiet couple of years.
LandmanLife isn’t about me. For a long time, it was an outlet for me to scream into the void. I wasn’t doing that to promote myself, or to make money, I was doing it because I felt it was something that needed to be said. There are a lot of things that I would like to write about from my experience running MYR, and maybe I will someday, but for now - let’s focus on the big picture.