Chemical Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Chemical Engineers worker at that point in the distribution, so $152,290 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 20,330 Chemical Engineers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Delaware, where the location quotient is 6.18, meaning the occupation holds 6.18 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 2,780 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 25.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $96,040 at the 25th percentile, $121,860 at the middle, $152,290 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $103,630, 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

Oklahoma posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $160,990, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Chemical Engineers stands number 557 by employment and number 68 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 26% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 13 of the 43 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $121,860, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,800 jobs, 8.9% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $123,790 a year, against $157,790 in Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $121,860 a year is $10,155 a month gross, $4,687 every two weeks, $2,343 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($96,040) to the 75th ($152,290) is worth $56,250 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $10,155 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $134,046 would sit between the median ($121,860) and the 75th percentile ($152,290), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $96,040, is $25,820 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Architects, Except Landscape and Naval, Architectural and Civil Drafters, Electronics Engineers, Except Computer, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Computer Hardware Engineers, Industrial Engineering Technologists and Technicians. The full directory is on the Careers hub.