Cartographers & Geospatial Creators

Cartographers and photogrammetrists held only about 13,400 jobs in all of the United States in 2024, making cartography one of the smallest recognized professions. The BLS projects roughly 1,000 annual openings over the next decade — a figure that includes both new positions and replacements. The median annual wage was $78,380, but the lowest-paid quartile earned just $62,860. With so few positions nationally, individual cartographers face extreme geographic concentration of opportunity and intense competition for a vanishingly small number of roles, leaving independent and freelance cartographers with almost no market cushion.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison — one of the most prominent cartography and GIS programs in the United States — announced that admissions to its online GIS certificates and degree programs will be suspended beginning with the Summer 2025 semester. Meanwhile, dedicated bachelor's and master's degree programs focused exclusively on cartography are "relatively rare" nationally, with most cartography education now folded into broader GIS or geography programs. Analysts have warned that "future shortages in cartography, photogrammetry, and geodesy seem likely because the number of graduates is too small (tens to hundreds)" to meet institutional demand, signaling a profession that is losing its educational infrastructure even as the need for skilled cartographic judgment grows.

NOAA completed the cancellation of all 1,007 traditional U.S. paper nautical charts in December 2024, ending over two centuries of paper chart production. Sales of NOAA paper nautical charts had already dropped more than 50% between 2010 and 2020. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) and SOLAS now require nearly all commercial ships to use Electronic Chart Display and Information Systems (ECDIS), while the IHO has set a target for full global replacement of legacy S-57 electronic charts with next-generation S-100 products by 2036. This eliminates an entire craft tradition of nautical chart making and displaces the specialized cartographers who designed, engraved, and maintained paper charts for maritime navigation.

Generative AI now enables "producing maps without explicit programmed rules," extending and in some cases surpassing human cartographic intelligence across the full workflow — conceptualization, data preparation, map design, and map evaluation. Machine learning algorithms can automatically identify and delineate roads, buildings, vegetation, and other features, reducing manual workload and accelerating map creation. Researchers have developed tools like Sat2Cap that create maps of any concept expressed using text over large geographic regions, a capability described as making traditional map-making processes "tedious and not scalable" by comparison. While precision and ethical concerns remain, these tools directly threaten the livelihoods of cartographers whose core value proposition was the skilled, labor-intensive process of transforming data into legible, well-designed maps.

The Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) Open portal — the bedrock of U.S. disaster response and community planning for two decades — has been shut down, leaving "a critical void that commercial and crowdsourced maps cannot fill." This represents the paradox geospatial creators face: government open data mandates simultaneously devalue custom cartographic work (by making raw data freely available) and create dependency (by making that free data essential to workflows). When these portals disappear, the GIS analysts and geospatial data creators who built products, services, and careers on top of open government data lose both their data supply and the client relationships that depended on it.

Geographic data are "difficult to protect through copyright alone," creating a fundamental vulnerability for cartographic creators. While maps can be protected by copyright when they contain original artistic and design elements, "the raw data of a dataset is not copyrightable" — meaning the factual geographic information that cartographers painstakingly collect, verify, and organize receives no intellectual property protection. U.S. government maps are entirely in the public domain with no restrictions. This legal framework means cartographers' most labor-intensive contribution (accurate, verified geospatial data) receives zero copyright protection, while their aesthetic design choices (which represent a smaller fraction of total effort) may qualify — a structural mismatch that makes it trivially easy for competitors to extract the valuable data while discarding the credited design.