Engineers, All Other Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Engineers, All Other worker at that point in the distribution, so $152,670 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

The occupation employed 150,750 people in May 2024, 0.10% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 26,500 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 30.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Louisiana, whose location quotient of 4.08 says this work is 4.08 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $183,510, which is 2.9 times the $62,840 at the 10th, a difference of $120,670 annually. Because the mean wage ($121,720) sits above the median ($117,750), 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 District of Columbia at $167,270; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Engineers, All Other stands number 205 by employment and number 75 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 22% more than its group median, and it supplies 5.9% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $117,750, 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

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV is the largest metro employer with 7,950 jobs, 5.3% 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, Lafayette, LA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $86,700 a year, against $166,900 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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

The median annual wage of $117,750 works out to $9,812 a month before taxes, $4,529 per biweekly paycheck, and $2,264 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($85,750) to the 75th ($152,670) is worth $66,920 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $129,525 would sit between the median ($117,750) and the 75th percentile ($152,670), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $85,750, is $32,000 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: Environmental Engineers, Mechanical Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors, Materials Engineers, Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers, Chemical Engineers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.