The Datum Report

Occupation 2483 · Professional occupations

Environmental health professionals

Half of full-time environmental health professionals in the UK earn more than £41,725 a year, and half earn less.

Environmental health professionals use specialist technical skills and knowledge to protect people from health risks associated with the environment in which they live and work. They maintain and safeguard standards, including taking legal action to enforce relevant legislation with regard to public health policy.

How people enter it

Entrants normally require a degree accredited by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) or the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland (REHIS). To gain chartered status an additional period of work experience is required or successful completion of the CIEH's chartered practitioner programme.

What the work involves

• inspects businesses for compliance with legislation on health and safety, food hygiene and food standards and takes appropriate action in the event of non-compliance
• follows up complaints of unsafe workplaces, investigating accidents
• investigates outbreaks of food poisoning, infectious diseases or pests
• monitors radiation activity, levels of noise, air, land and water pollution and takes appropriate action when safety levels are exceeded
• ensures animal welfare for compliance with legislation, issues licences for premises such as pet shops, zoos and abattoirs
• gives talks at public enquiries and meetings, ensures compliance through education, advice and enforcement
• initiates legal proceedings and gives evidence in court

Also called

Air pollution inspector · Environmental health officer · Food inspector · Public health inspector · Technical officer (environmental health)

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for environmental health professionals, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 5 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Quality assurance and regulatory professionals · Quality control and planning engineers