The Job That Keeps People From Drowning Pays About What Fast Food Does

This summer, on most weekdays, there is no lifeguard on the Maryland side of Assateague Island National Seashore.▸ The National Park Service calls it "response-only" coverage — one guard on call for emergencies, not the towers people are used to seeing. It's the second summer running: in July 2025, an 18-year-old drowned about 150 yards outside the guarded zone on the same beach, weeks after Maryland's two senators warned the Park Service that staffing cuts had left the shoreline exposed. Assateague isn't an outlier. It's a federal-scale version of a problem showing up in city pools everywhere.

Every spring, park and recreation agencies try to hire a seasonal lifeguard corps large enough to open every pool, beach, and water feature on schedule.▸ In May 2022, the National Recreation and Park Association surveyed agencies nationwide mid-hiring-season and found only 12% considered themselves fully staffed — the other 88% were still recruiting, and 14% had more than half their lifeguard positions vacant. Four in five agency leaders reported real consequences: heavier workloads for the staff they did have, and reduced or canceled aquatics programming.

That wasn't a one-year blip.▸ NRPA's 2024 Summer Seasonal Hiring Report, covering the summer of 2023, found six in seven agencies still had to take some corrective action to cover a seasonal-staff shortfall — and a third of those actions fell directly on the public: reduced pool hours, capped summer-camp enrollment, canceled programs, or pools kept closed outright.

The most common fix — pulling permanent full-time staff off their regular jobs to cover the gap, done by 56% of agencies — doesn't show up in any closure notice.▸ It shows up as a maintenance backlog, a canceled program, or a supervisor doing lifeguard shifts instead of running the department. The 30% of agencies that cut pool hours, and the 10% that kept some pools closed for the entire summer, are the visible tip of a much larger staffing problem.

The U.S. Department of Labor's occupational data — collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and published through O*NET OnLine — counted 149,700 people working as lifeguards or recreational protective service workers in 2024, earning a median $16.14 an hour, $33,580 a year, as of 2025.▸ That's a job requiring CPR and lifesaving certification, decent swimming ability, and the standing responsibility to notice a drowning in progress and act within seconds. It pays about $2,380 a year more than fast-food and counter workers ($31,200), about the same as amusement and recreation attendants ($32,150), and $10,890 less a year than EMTs and paramedics ($44,470) — the other line of work built around the same first few minutes after someone stops breathing.

Pay this close to the wage floor, for seasonal work that mostly competes with retail and food service for the same 16-to-24-year-old applicant pool, is a big part of why agencies can't fill the roster before Memorial Day.▸ It also shows up in how fast the workforce turns over.

Over the 2024–2034 period, the Labor Department projects 42,700 lifeguard job openings from growth and replacement combined — equal to 28.5% of today's entire 149,700-person workforce.▸ EMTs and paramedics, a similarly-sized occupation at 181,000 workers, need only 14,100 openings filled over the same span — 7.8% of their workforce. Lifeguarding isn't just short-staffed in any given May; it's an occupation the people who take it don't stay in.

Drowning kills about 4,000 people a year in the United States and is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4, per the CDC's 2024 Vital Signs report on drowning death rates — a report noting rates rose in 2020–2022 versus 2019, reversing decades of decline.▸ None of that proves any single drowning was caused by an empty lifeguard chair; drownings happen at guarded beaches too. What the staffing data shows is a supervision system running well under its own target most years, with the shortfall absorbed as reduced hours, canceled programs, and — at places like Assateague — no daily coverage at all.

Wage and employment figures are national medians and totals; local pay and staffing levels vary widely by state and municipality. The 88%-not-staffed figure is from NRPA's May 2022 survey, the most recent staffing-specific census identified; the 2023 hiring-shortfall data is the most recent year for which NRPA has published detailed coping-action figures.