Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($53,730) to the 90th ($120,440). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 9,060 Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Kansas, where the location quotient is 7.75, meaning the occupation holds 7.75 times its national share of local jobs. Florida employs the most people outright, 1,590 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 38.7% of the national total.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $66,710 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($120,440) is 2.2 times the 10th percentile ($53,730), a gap of $66,710 a year. The mean of $86,330 sitting above the median of $79,830 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 26 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Colorado at $124,290; the jobs leader is Florida:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians stands number 697 by employment and number 211 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Architecture and Engineering Occupations, the group median wage is $96,690 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 17% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 12 of the 23 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $79,830, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL is the largest metro employer with 830 jobs, 9.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 31 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Wichita, KS posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $73,460 a year, against $93,140 in Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians paycheck, gross, is $3,070 every two weeks on an annual $79,830, which is $6,652 a month and $1,535 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($64,570) to the 75th ($102,220) is worth $37,650 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $87,813 would sit between the median ($79,830) and the 75th percentile ($102,220), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $64,570, is $15,260 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Architecture and Engineering Occupations

Sibling occupations in Architecture and Engineering Occupations: Surveyors, Mechanical Drafters, Environmental Engineers, Mechanical Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors, Materials Engineers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.