How Much Do Crime Scene Cleaners Make? Biohazard Technician Pay

Our research found no dedicated crime scene cleanup, biohazard technician or trauma scene cleaner occupation in the federal wage-data system, and no wage series published under those names.

That means the salary figures attached to this job come from neighboring occupations, not from a crime scene cleaner pay line.

The closest published group is building cleaning workers, all other (SOC 37-2019).

O*NET defines it only as “all building cleaning workers not listed separately,” and publishes no task data for it — an “all other” residual code that sweeps up every cleaner who does not fit a named category.

In May 2025, that group counted 17,210 wage-and-salary jobs nationally, with a median of $21.17 an hour — $44,040 a year.

The 10th percentile earned $32,370, and the 90th percentile earned $64,030 (BLS OEWS, all industries).

Read those numbers as a reference point, not as the job’s pay.

The residual group is dominated by ordinary cleaning work: 12,080 of its 17,210 jobs sat in services to buildings and dwellings, where the median was $44,450 ($21.37 an hour) — essentially the same median.

That industry covers janitorial, pest control, landscaping, carpet cleaning and similar services rather than trauma scene cleanup.

The state picture is thin as well.

BLS published a 37-2019 row for only 30 of 54 state-level areas in May 2025, and several of the published rows carry suppressed employment counts.

For outlook, BLS projects the group to grow 2.0 percent from 2025 to 2035 — 18,600 to 19,000 jobs, with 2,500 openings a year on average.

That projections series counts self-employed workers the wage survey does not, which is why its counts run above the OEWS figure.

The federal series, the projections and the board’s own listing data sit side by side in our restoration industry statistics.

The scenes this work responds to do not arrive on a schedule, and for an hourly tech quiet call-outs mean a short week.

That variance is why the annual medians in the first section only go so far.

When employers cover unscheduled demand with an on-call rotation, the rotation changes what a week’s pay even means.

Federal wage-hour law draws the line: under the FLSA (29 CFR 785.17), on-call time is hours worked when the employee is required to stay on the employer’s premises or so close that the time cannot effectively be used for personal purposes.

The rule is a Department of Labor regulation.

An employee who merely has to leave word where they can be reached is not working while on call.

Night call-outs have their own rule.

If an employee who has gone home is called out at night to travel a substantial distance to an emergency job for an employer’s customer, all of that travel time is working time (29 CFR 785.36).

Overtime stacks on top of the irregularity.

For an employee covered by the overtime rules, federal wage-hour law puts the maximum at 40 hours in a workweek without overtime pay (29 CFR 778.101), and overtime is paid at not less than 1.5 times the regular rate (29 CFR 778.107).

The workweek is a fixed, regularly recurring 168-hour period, counted by the week rather than the day (29 CFR 778.105).

Hourly rates, day rates, per-job pricing and commissions are all pay structures federal wage-hour law addresses — which one applies to an offer is written in the employer’s plan, not in any published table.

Day and job rates are legal under federal wage-hour law, but they do not step around overtime (29 CFR 778.112).

The regular rate is all the day or job pay for the week divided by total hours worked, and the tech is still owed an extra half-time for every hour over 40.

Commission and percentage-of-job arrangements are treated the same way.

Commissions are payments for hours worked, and they must be included in a non-exempt employee’s regular rate for overtime, however and whenever they are paid (29 CFR 778.117).

Hazard pay — extra money attached to scenes involving decomposition, bloodborne exposure or other high-risk conditions — has no line in the published series.

That series reports a single median for the whole residual occupation, so any premium structure lives in employer pay plans.

What a company pays per scene, per call-out or for suited hours is a fair question to ask before you accept an offer — and the answer belongs in the offer, not in a job ad.

If you see a six-figure income quoted for this job, the published wage data is the reality check on it.

In the closest published group, the median was $44,040 in May 2025, and the 90th percentile — the earners ahead of 90 percent of the group — was $64,030.

That is the highest percentile the series publishes for the group this work gets folded into.

Six figures does appear in the federal data one rung up.

First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers (SOC 47-1011) — the closest published supervision group for this field’s crew leads — had a 90th percentile of $128,260 against a median of $79,920.

That is a supervision number across all construction and extraction trades, not a cleaner’s.

Ownership is where the wage series go quiet.

OEWS wage data does not cover the self-employed or owners and partners in unincorporated firms, and our research found no federal benchmark for what a biohazard cleanup company’s owner takes home.

The realistic read: the published figures are annual medians for a whole residual occupation, and nothing in them separates busy weeks from quiet ones.

If a pitch assumes constant volume, treat the annualized number as marketing until an employer’s pay plan shows otherwise.

Employer settings in this field include dedicated biohazard and trauma scene companies, general restoration companies, and franchise locations.

The employer landscape — who hires, and what each setting is like — is the biohazard technician career guide’s territory, so this section sticks to what each setting means for pay.

Our research found no published wage series that separates the employer types.

The federal data folds this work into one residual occupation with a single national median and thin state rows, and its largest published industry slice is services to buildings and dwellings — 12,080 of 17,210 jobs.

Our research found nothing in the public wage data that tells you whether a national trauma scene firm out-pays a local restoration company for the same scene.

What can differ is the shape of the work under the paycheck.

A dedicated biohazard crew’s hours track its call volume, while a general restorer’s techs can fold trauma scenes into water, fire and mold jobs between scenes — a mix that can steady a week’s hours.

That is why comparing offers beats comparing brands.

The same title can sit on entirely different pay plans at two companies, and the plan — base rate, call-out terms, per-scene rates, premiums — is what the offer letter and the pay conversation should pin down.

The pay ladder in this field runs through responsibility.

Techs move to lead tech, then to supervisor or operations roles, and some open companies of their own.

Lead tech is the first rung, and its pay is whatever the employer’s plan sets — our research found no published figure for lead-tech pay in this niche, which makes the offer conversation the real data source.

Supervision is where the federal data has something to say.

First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers (SOC 47-1011) earned a median of $38.42 an hour — $79,920 a year — in May 2025, with the 10th percentile at $53,280 and the 90th at $128,260.

That group covers supervisors across all construction and extraction trades.

Inside remediation and other waste management services — an industry row not limited to remediation — the same supervisor group’s median was $70,020 on 10,930 jobs.

Ownership changes the question entirely, and the wage series stop at the door: they count payroll jobs only, so self-employed owners never appear in them.

What an owner earns depends on the company’s own job costing — revenue per job set against crews, equipment, disposal and overhead — and no federal median substitutes for that arithmetic.

Certification is the other lever people ask about.

Our research found no published wage figure that ties a credential to a raise in this field, so treat any specific percentage attached to a certification as unverified, and ask the employer how their plan actually rewards it.

Biohazard cleanup work is posted under several titles — crime scene cleaner, trauma scene cleanup technician and biohazard remediation technician among them.

Searching one title only finds the listings that use it.

On this board the aliases do that widening for you: crime scene cleaner and trauma cleanup technician route to the same role, and biohazard cleanup jobs is the listing page for the field under every title.

Career information, not legal, tax or pay advice. The wage figures above are from BLS’s May 2025 OEWS release, labelled stand-ins for this occupation, and the overtime and on-call points describe federal rules as written. Confirm how any rule applies to a specific arrangement with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, and how a job pays with the employer making the offer.