Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers offer sit among all 21,860 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 21,860, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. Massachusetts leads the state table with 3,920 jobs; the top three states sum to 39.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Massachusetts posts a location quotient of 7.58, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $86,630 at the 25th percentile, $106,950 at the middle, $133,570 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $93,200, a ratio of 2.3 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 38 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Wisconsin at $129,440; the jobs leader is Massachusetts:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers stands number 541 by employment and number 90 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 11% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.9% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 15 of the 37 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $106,950, 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

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH is the largest metro employer with 3,410 jobs, 15.6% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 67 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $104,770 a year, against $138,950 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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 Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers paycheck, gross, is $4,113 every two weeks on an annual $106,950, which is $8,912 a month and $2,057 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($86,630) to the 75th ($133,570) is worth $46,940 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 $117,645 would sit between the median ($106,950) and the 75th percentile ($133,570), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $86,630, is $20,320 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: Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Surveying and Mapping Technicians, Surveyors, Mechanical Drafters, Environmental Engineers, Mechanical Engineering Technologists and Technicians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.