Architectural and Engineering Managers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Architectural and Engineering Managers worker at that point in the distribution, so $207,210 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 210,340 Architectural and Engineering Managers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.14% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Michigan, where the location quotient is 2.34, meaning the occupation holds 2.34 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 30,690 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 29.8% of the national total.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $167,740 and the mean of $175,710. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 51 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 30,690 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New Mexico would lead at $215,730. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Architectural and Engineering Managers stands number 160 by employment and number 27 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Management Occupations, the group median wage is $106,980 across 38 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 57% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.9% of the group's 10,966,830 jobs. In 17 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $167,740, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 8,850 jobs, 4.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 334 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $122,340 a year, against $248,540 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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 annual wage of $167,740 works out to $13,978 a month before taxes, $6,452 per biweekly paycheck, and $3,226 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($134,930) to the 75th ($207,210) is worth $72,280 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $184,514 would sit between the median ($167,740) and the 75th percentile ($207,210), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $134,930, is $32,810 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Management Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Human Resources Managers, Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers, Chief Executives, Social and Community Service Managers, Education Administrators, Postsecondary, Facilities Managers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.