Computer Hardware Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Computer Hardware Engineers worker at that point in the distribution, so $185,380 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 75,710 Computer Hardware Engineers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.05% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in California, where the location quotient is 2.73, meaning the occupation holds 2.73 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 24,200 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 40.9% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $223,820, which is 2.6 times the $85,430 at the 10th, a difference of $138,390 annually. Because the mean wage ($156,770) sits above the median ($155,020), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 24,200 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Connecticut would lead at $188,540. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Computer Hardware Engineers stands number 314 by employment and number 33 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 60% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.9% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 7 of the 44 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $155,020, 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

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA is the largest metro employer with 9,320 jobs, 12.3% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $111,810 a year, against $203,400 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $155,020 a year is $12,918 a month gross, $5,962 every two weeks, $2,981 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($115,500) to the 75th ($185,380) is worth $69,880 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 $12,918 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 $170,522 would sit between the median ($155,020) and the 75th percentile ($185,380), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $115,500, is $39,520 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: Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Engineers, All Other, Architects, Except Landscape and Naval, Architectural and Civil Drafters, Electronics Engineers, Except Computer. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.