Drafters, All Other Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Drafters, All Other worker at that point in the distribution, so $77,750 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

May 2024 employment stood at 16,010, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 2,140 jobs; the top three states sum to 32.7% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Louisiana posts a location quotient of 5.26, 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: $50,970 at the 25th percentile, $62,010 at the middle, $77,750 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $54,450, 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

Massachusetts posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $87,820, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Drafters, All Other stands number 599 by employment and number 375 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 36% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 16 of the 41 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $62,010, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 1,010 jobs, 6.3% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $65,470 a year, against $75,980 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $62,010 a year is $5,168 a month gross, $2,385 every two weeks, $1,192 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($50,970) to the 75th ($77,750) is worth $26,780 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 $5,168 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 $68,211 would sit between the median ($62,010) and the 75th percentile ($77,750), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $50,970, is $11,040 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: Industrial Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Engineers, All Other, Architects, Except Landscape and Naval, Architectural and Civil Drafters. The full directory is on the Careers hub.