Electrical Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Electrical Engineers offer sit among all 188,790 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

The occupation employed 188,790 people in May 2024, 0.12% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 23,650 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 26.5% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Vermont, whose location quotient of 2.44 says this work is 2.44 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $175,460, which is 2.3 times the $74,670 at the 10th, a difference of $100,790 annually. Because the mean wage ($120,980) sits above the median ($111,910), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New Mexico at $143,850; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Electrical Engineers stands number 168 by employment and number 81 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 16% more than its group median, and it supplies 7.4% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 14 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $111,910, 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 7,870 jobs, 4.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 319 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $75,340 a year, against $189,040 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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 Electrical Engineers paycheck, gross, is $4,304 every two weeks on an annual $111,910, which is $9,326 a month and $2,152 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($87,590) to the 75th ($141,630) is worth $54,040 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 $123,101 would sit between the median ($111,910) and the 75th percentile ($141,630), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $87,590, is $24,320 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: Mechanical Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors, Materials Engineers, Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers, Chemical Engineers, Electrical and Electronics Drafters. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.