Electronics Engineers, Except Computer Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Electronics Engineers, Except Computer worker at that point in the distribution, so $164,000 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 93,940 Electronics Engineers, Except Computer jobs in May 2024, which is 0.06% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Colorado, where the location quotient is 3.25, meaning the occupation holds 3.25 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 19,560 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 36.6% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $199,060, which is 2.5 times the $79,390 at the 10th, a difference of $119,670 annually. Because the mean wage ($132,500) sits above the median ($127,590), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $161,570, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Electronics Engineers, Except Computer stands number 283 by employment and number 57 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 32% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.7% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 11 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $127,590, 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

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH is the largest metro employer with 5,090 jobs, 5.4% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 171 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, Oklahoma City, OK posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $108,820 a year, against $186,770 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $10,632 a month before tax, $4,907 biweekly, $2,454 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($98,920) to the 75th ($164,000) is worth $65,080 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $140,349 would sit between the median ($127,590) and the 75th percentile ($164,000), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $98,920, is $28,670 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: Cartographers and Photogrammetrists, Environmental Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians, Marine Engineers and Naval Architects, Mining and Geological Engineers, Including Mining Safety Engineers, Agricultural Engineers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.