undergradly.
Major · Architecture & Related Services

The professional-school route into city planning, with grad school baked in

City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning is the studio-and-policy undergraduate path into urban planning. About 654 bachelor's degrees are awarded annually across 50 colleges, with five-year median earnings around $68,977 — but the credential that gates the career is a master's, not the bachelor's.

Schools offering
50
Annual completions
654
Typical degree level
Bachelor's
Median earnings (5yr)
$69k

About this major

City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning is the professional-school undergraduate path into urban planning — the studio-and-policy sibling to the more academic Urban Studies/Affairs major. The CIP definition stitches together design and policy in equal measure: principles of architecture, master plan development, transportation and communications systems, community and commercial development, zoning, land use, applied economics, policy analysis, and applicable laws and regulations. In practice, the major lives inside colleges of architecture, design, or planning at most schools, blending design studios on site planning and downtown master plans with seminars on housing policy, transportation, and environmental planning, and quantitative methods coursework heavy on GIS, demography, and basic econometrics.

The field is small at the undergraduate level: 654 bachelor's completions a year across 50 colleges. Top producers cluster around large public-flagship architecture and planning schools — ASU Digital Immersion at 91 completions a year, ASU Tempe at 39, the University of Arizona at 67, Cal Poly Pomona at 44, Texas A&M at 38, UW-Seattle at 35, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo at 30, with Cornell, Ohio State, and the University of Cincinnati rounding out the leaders. The undergraduate top-ten doesn't fully overlap with the master's prestige tier (MIT, Harvard GSD, Berkeley, Cornell, UNC Chapel Hill, UPenn, UCLA, USC, Michigan), which matters because the career credential — AICP — runs through the master's program, not the bachelor's.

On the destinations side, the data lists Urban and Regional Planners at $83,720 median wage with 3.4% projected growth, but flags master's degree as the typical entry-level education for that role. The five-year bachelor's median sits at $68,977, reflecting a mix of bachelor's-accessible Planner I, planning-technician, GIS-analyst, and community-development roles in city and county departments, metropolitan planning organizations, councils of governments, state DOTs, federal agencies (HUD, EPA, FHWA, FEMA), and the consulting side at AECOM, HDR, Stantec, Kimley-Horn, and WSP. The bachelor's is the on-ramp; the master's is the credential.

Section 3 · Careers

Where this major leads

Occupations most often associated with this major, from the federal BLS+O*NET crosswalk. Job-growth projections and median wages are national.

Occupation Median wage Job growth Typical education
Architectural and engineering managers $168k +3.8% Bachelor's degree
Urban and regional planners $84k +3.4% Master's degree
Social sciences teachers, postsecondary, all other $75k +1.7% Doctoral or professional degree
Architecture teachers, postsecondary $101k +2.0% Doctoral or professional degree
Section 4 · Earnings

Earnings at a glance

Median graduate earnings from the federal College Scorecard, 5 and 10 years out.

Median 5-year earnings

$69k

Who this major is for

You may thrive here if you find yourself drawn to how cities are physically and politically made — zoning maps, transit corridors, downtown plans, housing density debates — and want a major that puts you in front of those questions through both studio and policy coursework. Comfort with iterative design critique matters because the studio component is real, even if it's lighter than in Architecture or Landscape Architecture. GIS fluency rewards the technically inclined and is the most direct bachelor's-level path into a paying job. Public service or consulting work at AECOM, HDR, or Stantec should sound more interesting than a private-sector ladder, and you should be willing to treat the bachelor's as a pre-graduate-school degree — most of the named career destinations and the AICP credential require a Master of Urban Planning, Master of Urban and Regional Planning, or Master of City and Regional Planning to land.

Reconsider this route if you want a four-year undergraduate exit straight into the planner title — the data shows Urban and Regional Planners at $83,720 require a master's, and most senior public-sector planners pursue AICP certification on top. Pause if you want pure social-science work without studio — the cross-referenced 45.1201 Urban Studies/Affairs major (806 annual completions) gets you to similar destinations through a sociology, political-science, and policy lens with no design studio. Pause if your interest is really in building design — Architecture (04.0201, 3,649 annual completions, NCARB licensure), Landscape Architecture (04.0601, 679 completions, LARE licensure), and Architectural Engineering (14.0401, 901 completions) sit in the same concentration but lead to different licensed professions. And reconsider if a $68,977 five-year bachelor's median, with the higher tracked wages gated by graduate school, doesn't justify the four-year design-and-policy investment plus an additional two-year MUP — the timeline to AICP and senior-planner pay typically runs six to eight years from college start.

Section 6 · Where to study

Top colleges for City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning

Ranked by annual completions at the associate's or bachelor's level — a proxy for program scale.

College Location Assoc. Bach. Total
Arizona State University Digital Immersion Scottsdale, AZ 0 91 91
University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 0 67 67
California State Polytechnic University-Pomona Pomona, CA 0 44 44
Arizona State University Campus Immersion Tempe, AZ 0 39 39
Texas A&M University-College Station College Station, TX 0 38 38
University of Washington-Seattle Campus Seattle, WA 0 35 35
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo San Luis Obispo, CA 0 30 30
Cornell University Ithaca, NY 0 27 27
Ohio State University-Main Campus Columbus, OH 0 24 24
University of Cincinnati-Main Campus Cincinnati, OH 0 24 24
Section 7 · Explore sideways

Related majors to explore

Architectural and Building Sciences/Technology

3,888 completions/yr

Architecture

3,649 completions/yr

Architectural Engineering

901 completions/yr

Urban Studies/Affairs

806 completions/yr

Landscape Architecture

679 completions/yr

Interior Architecture

653 completions/yr

Environmental Design/Architecture

552 completions/yr

Real Estate Development

200 completions/yr
Section 9 · Frequently asked

Common questions

Do I actually need a master's degree to work as a planner?
For the career this major is named after, yes. The data lists Urban and Regional Planners at $83,720 median wage with 3.4% projected growth and explicitly flags Master's degree as typical entry-level education. The professional credential — AICP from the American Institute of Certified Planners — requires a master's from a PAB-accredited program plus two years of qualifying experience, or a non-PAB master's plus three years, or a bachelor's plus four to eight years depending on accreditation. Bachelor's graduates can land Planner I or planning-technician roles at city, county, MPO (metropolitan planning organization), and COG (council of governments) offices, but advancing to senior planner, principal planner, and the AICP credential effectively requires graduate school. Treat the bachelor's as the on-ramp to an MUP, MURP, or MCRP, not as a terminal credential.
How is this different from Urban Studies/Affairs (CIP 45.1201)?
These are the two main undergraduate routes into the planning world and they sit in different schools for a reason. City/Urban, Community, and Regional Planning (CIP 04.0301, 654 completions a year) is the professional-school version — usually housed in a college of architecture, design, or planning, with studio coursework, site analysis, master-plan exercises, and direct plan-making training. Urban Studies/Affairs (CIP 45.1201, 806 completions a year) lives in the social sciences and leans toward urban sociology, political economy, and policy analysis without the studio component. If you already know you want to be a planner and want the most direct undergraduate runway into an MUP, the 04.0301 sibling is closer to professional preparation. If you want a broader social-science lens with research and policy as the destination, Urban Studies is the more natural fit.
Is this major accredited at the bachelor's level?
Mostly not, and that matters for the AICP timeline. The Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) accredits about 75 master's programs in the U.S. but only a small handful of bachelor's programs — most undergraduate planning departments are unaccredited at the BA/BS level even when their master's program is fully PAB-accredited. The practical effect: most bachelor's graduates need either a PAB-accredited master's plus two years of experience, or a non-PAB master's plus three years, to qualify for AICP. A bachelor's-only path to AICP exists but typically requires four to eight years of qualifying planning experience, longer if the bachelor's itself was unaccredited. Verify the specific accreditation status of any program — it changes the credentialing timeline more than the school's reputation does.
What do City Planning majors actually study day-to-day?
The CIP definition lists the core: principles of architecture, master plan development, transportation and communications systems design, community and commercial development, zoning, land use planning, applied economics, policy analysis, and applicable laws and regulations. In practice, the major blends design studio (site planning, urban design exercises, downtown master plans) with policy seminars (housing, transportation, environmental planning) and quantitative methods (GIS, demography, statistics, basic econometrics). GIS fluency in particular separates this major from Urban Studies — most programs require multiple GIS courses and a capstone tied to a real city, neighborhood, or regional planning problem. Software-wise, expect ArcGIS Pro or QGIS, AutoCAD or Rhino for design studios, Adobe for graphics, and increasingly Python for spatial analysis.
What kinds of jobs do bachelor's graduates actually get?
The bachelor's-accessible market is mostly public-sector and consulting-firm entry roles. Public-sector destinations dominate: city and county planning departments, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), councils of governments (COGs), state DOTs, regional water and transit authorities, and federal agencies like HUD, EPA, FHWA, and FEMA. Private-sector hiring concentrates at AECOM, HDR, Stantec, Kimley-Horn, WSP, and smaller boutique planning consultancies, plus real estate development, transportation engineering firms, and increasingly tech-adjacent civic-data and PropTech roles. Typical entry titles include Planner I, planning technician, GIS analyst, community development associate, transportation planning analyst, and zoning specialist. The named career in the data, Urban and Regional Planners at $83,720, is the master's-required role; entry-level bachelor's salaries in this field typically run $48,000 to $62,000, with strong-market metros at the top of that range.
Where is this major concentrated, and which schools matter for grad school?
The 654 annual completions concentrate in a small number of schools: ASU Digital Immersion (91 per year) and the on-campus ASU program (39), the University of Arizona (67), Cal Poly Pomona (44), Texas A&M (38), University of Washington-Seattle (35), Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (30), Cornell (27), Ohio State (24), and University of Cincinnati (24). The undergraduate top producers don't fully overlap with the prestige master's programs — the MUP/MURP/MCRP rankings center on MIT, Harvard GSD, UC Berkeley, Cornell, UNC Chapel Hill, UPenn, UCLA, USC, and the University of Michigan. If your plan is bachelor's then top-tier MUP, optimize the bachelor's choice for studio-portfolio quality, GIS coursework, and applied capstone access — the master's program does the prestige lift on the planner-credential side.