Table of Contents
Introduction
In 2024 FDM conducted a Geospatial Salary and Skills Survey for the island of Ireland. The survey submissions were analysed by Richardson Dzikiti with core insights presented at the AGI Northern Ireland Conference in June 2025. You can download Richardson’s presentation slides here.
At FDM we believe information about the geospatial industry belongs to all who’s careers help shape the future through geospatial technology. You can download a stripped down version of the data submitted here. We implore you to garner your own insights and share with the us, we would like to grow this blog post with analysis performed by the geospatial community of Ireland.
Geospatial Salary & Skills Survey Ireland 2025
The 2025 edition of the survey is under way and can be found here. Please fill in and share to your network, peers, and colleagues. The more submissions we get the better the insights that can be generated.
The continuation of this survey is important for many reasons such as;
- Career planning
- Identifying skills gaps
- Aiding with employee retention
- Market trends
- Curriculum development
Geospatial Salary & Skills Survey Ireland 2024
On to some highlights from the 2024 Geospatial Salary & Skills for Ireland beginning with an overview of respondents.
Overview
Not a bad turnout for the inaugural year of the Survey, but I know there are far more out there so we hope to see the numbers improve with the years. Not all submissions could take part for various reasons such as incorrect input of information and extreme outliers were removed and we also go a portion of submissions from outside of Ireland and some people looking for a job in the feedback!
Salary
Highlights:
- Salaries in the Geospatial sphere generally outperforms the national average.
- Salary stagnation after 10 years of experience
- Gender pay-gap 10.3% versus the National 7.9%
Salary Satisfaction
An interesting graphic showing that 59% of respondents are dissatisfied with their current salary with only 15% slightly satisfied and a mere 4% extremely satisfied. Richardson stated that Ulster has the highest level of satisfaction even though it had the lowest median salary, while Munster had the the highest median salary but posted the most dissatisfaction.
Education
Overall, the Geospatial Industry in Ireland has an extremely skilled workforce with 79% of respondents having a Masters Degree or above. This is far above the national 14%.
It would seem evident that Geospatial Masters graduates are underpaid. If you look at the table above, 73% of graduates from Taught Masters earn over €40,000, Research Master 52%, yet the survey shows that only 15% of Geospatial graduates earn over €40,000. This could possibly tie in with the overall salary dissatisfaction.
Skills
It is evident that automation skills have a higher earning power especially with FME and programming (Python/R – but not limited to these). There is a 17.1% average increase in salary for those with FME and programming skills.
When it comes to programming, niche libraries are the winner! Check out below.
The graphic above poses some interesting thoughts. The open-source technologies; PostGIS, R, SQL, Python (PySAL, GeoPy), JavaScript (OpenLayers, Leaflet) have the highest average salaries, but take a look at the number of respondents, it is quite low. This would indicate that there are fewer open-source technology jobs out there, but they pay more on average. The survey showed the over 80% of respondents used Esri technology, which could indicate that these are the more common skills in demand.
Workforce
Employers take note, your geospatial superstars are looking to leave. Just look at the numbers above! 76% of respondents in Munster are looking to move on. This ties in with the overall salary dissatisfaction for Munster, and for Ulster, who posted the lowest percentage of respondents looking to leave, but that still stands at a high 66%.
A big take away from Richardson’s analysis is that respondents earning less than €40,000 are the highest risk for moving jobs and that the 3 year tenure is the critical turning point with 82% of respondents looking to move on at this stage, especially if they earn less than €40,000.
The current working arrangment shows that in industry is currently flexible.
Only 5% of respondents are always on-site and 4% on-site for one day a week. 32% have a fully remote setup. I will be interesting to see how these numbers evolve over the coming years as we move away from COVID arrangements.
Outro
The insights available in this post are only a selection of the more common aspects. A trimmed down version of the data is available here, and we ask you to perform your own analysis and share with us the insights that you find. We will update this post with further insights, but for now, don’t forget to take this years Survey.