Civil Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Civil Engineers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $78,790. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 355,410 people in May 2024, 0.23% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 54,640 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 31.3% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Alaska, whose location quotient of 2.08 says this work is 2.08 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $65,920 or less, and one in ten earns $160,990 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.4 to 1 and the annual gap is $95,070. The mean ($107,050) versus median ($99,590) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 54,640 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $118,450. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Civil Engineers stands number 103 by employment and number 130 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 3% more than its group median, and it supplies 13.8% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 18 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $99,590, 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 16,390 jobs, 4.6% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $74,680 a year, against $138,030 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

The median Civil Engineers paycheck, gross, is $3,830 every two weeks on an annual $99,590, which is $8,299 a month and $1,915 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($78,790) to the 75th ($128,290) is worth $49,500 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 $109,549 would sit between the median ($99,590) and the 75th percentile ($128,290), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $78,790, is $20,800 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Industrial Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Aerospace Engineers, Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Except Drafters, All Other, Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Surveying and Mapping Technicians, Surveyors. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.